Unit testing a controller in ASP.NET MVC 2 with RedirectToAction
- by Rob Walker
I have a controller that implements a simple Add operation on an entity and redirects to the Details page:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Add(Thing thing)
{
// ... do validation, db stuff ...
return this.RedirectToAction<c => c.Details(thing.Id));
}
This works great (using the RedirectToAction from the MvcContrib assembly).
When I'm unit testing this method I want to access the ViewData that is returned from the Details action (so I can get the newly inserted thing's primary key and prove it is now in the database).
The test has:
var result = controller.Add(thing);
But result here is of type: System.Web.Mvc.RedirectToRouteResult (which is a System.Web.Mvc.ActionResult). It doesn't hasn't yet executed the Details method.
I've tried calling ExecuteResult on the returned object passing in a mocked up ControllerContext but the framework wasn't happy with the lack of detail in the mocked object.
I could try filling in the details, etc, etc but then my test code is way longer than the code I'm testing and I feel I need unit tests for the unit tests!
Am I missing something in the testing philosophy? How do I test this action when I can't get at its returned state?
