Fixture to Generate automated data in unit testing.

Automated or test data is very essential to unit test the functionality. We can use Fixture to generate automated random data in time of unit testing.

You can add AutoFixture framework from nugget package manager . 

Let’s see one simple example to generate automated data using Fixture. Here is my small add functionality which will return addition of two numbers.

class TestClass

    {

        public int Add( int a, int b)

        {

            return a + b;

        }

    }

And here is code to test the functionality.

[TestClass]

    public class UnitTestClass

    {

        [TestMethod]

        public void Add_Test_Function()

        {

            var fixture = new Fixture();

            int x = fixture.CreateAnonymous<int>();

            int y = fixture.CreateAnonymous<int>();

            var testObject = new Code.TestClass();

            Assert.AreEqual(testObject.Add(x,y),x+y);

        }

    }

In Add_Test_Function , we have created object of Fixture class and then calling CreateAnonymous<T> function to generate automated int data because T is specified as integer.

Ok, so we have generated primitive data using fixture, but how we can generate user defined object ? 

In this example we will generate random user defied object.

Here is our class for which we would like to generate objects.

class TestClass

    {

        public int Id { get; set; }

        public string  Name { get; set; }

        public void AddData(IEnumerable<TestClass> param)

        {

           

        }

    }

Here is test functionality to call AddData function by generating random object of TestClass class.

[TestClass]

    public class UnitTestClass

    {

        [TestMethod]

        public void Add_Test_Function()

        {

            var fixture = new Fixture();

            fixture.Behaviors.Remove(new ThrowingRecursionBehavior());

            fixture.Behaviors.Add(new OmitOnRecursionBehavior());

            new Code.TestClass().AddData(fixture.CreateMany<Code.TestClass>(new Random().Next(1,20)));

        }

    }

And we are seeing that it has generated few random objects.