Mocking WebResponse's from a WebRequest
- by Rob Cooper
I have finally started messing around with creating some apps that work with RESTful web interfaces, however, I am concerned that I am hammering their servers every time I hit F5 to run a series of tests..
Basically, I need to get a series of web responses so I can test I am parsing the varying responses correctly, rather than hit their servers every time, I thought I could do this once, save the XML and then work locally.
However, I don't see how I can "mock" a WebResponse, since (AFAIK) they can only be instantiated by WebRequest.GetResponse
How do you guys go about mocking this sort of thing? Do you? I just really don't like the fact I am hammering their servers :S I dont want to change the code too much, but I expect there is a elegant way of doing this..
Update Following Accept
Will's answer was the slap in the face I needed, I knew I was missing a fundamental point!
Create an Interface that will return a proxy object which represents the XML.
Implement the interface twice, on that uses WebRequest, the other that returns static "responses".
The interface implmentation then either instantiates the return type based on the response, or the static XML.
You can then pass the required class when testing or at production to the service layer.
Once I have the code knocked up, I'll paste some samples.
Thanks Will :)
