ASP.NET MVC unit testing custom AuthorizeAttribute

Question

I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC 4 project (.NET framework 4) and I was wondering how to properly unit test a custom AuthorizeAttribute (I use NUnit and Moq).

I overrode 2 methods: AuthorizeCore(HttpContextBase httpContext) and HandleUnauthorizedRequest(AuthorizationContext filterContext). As you can see, these methods expect an HttpContextBase and AuthorizationContext respectively, but I don't know how to Mock these.

This is as far as I got:

[Test]
public void HandleUnauthorizedRequest_UnexistingMaster_RedirectsToCommonNoMaster()
{
    // Arrange
    var httpContext = new Mock<HttpContextBase>();
    var winIdentity = new Mock<IIdentity>();
    winIdentity.Setup(i => i.IsAuthenticated).Returns(() => true);
    winIdentity.Setup(i => i.Name).Returns(() => "WHEEEE");
    httpContext.SetupGet(c => c.User).Returns(() => new ImdPrincipal(winIdentity.Object)); // This is my implementation of IIdentity
    var requestBase = new Mock<HttpRequestBase>();
    var headers = new NameValueCollection
        {
           {"Special-Header-Name", "false"}
        };
    requestBase.Setup(x => x.Headers).Returns(headers);
    requestBase.Setup(x => x.HttpMethod).Returns("GET");
    requestBase.Setup(x => x.Url).Returns(new Uri("http://localhost/"));
    requestBase.Setup(x => x.RawUrl).Returns("~/Maintenance/UnExistingMaster");
    requestBase.Setup(x => x.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath).Returns(() => "~/Maintenance/UnExistingMaster");
    requestBase.Setup(x => x.IsAuthenticated).Returns(() => true);
    httpContext.Setup(x => x.Request).Returns(requestBase.Object);
    var controller = new Mock<ControllerBase>();
    var actionDescriptor = new Mock<ActionDescriptor>();
    var controllerContext = new ControllerContext(httpContext.Object, new RouteData(), controller.Object);

    // Act
    var masterAttr = new ImdMasterAuthorizeAttribute();
    var filterContext = new AuthorizationContext(controllerContext, actionDescriptor.Object);
    masterAttr.OnAuthorization(filterContext);

    // Assert
    Assert.AreEqual("", filterContext.HttpContext.Response);
}

On the line: masterAttr.OnAuthorization(filterContext); a NullReferenceException is thrown. I presume it has something to do with a value in a context we haven't mocked yet.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Sincerely, Yanik Ceulemans

Answer 1

Without the code for the attribute one can only guess. But to start investigating, you can create your mocks with MockBehavior.Strict. That way Moq will throw exception when a method or property on the mock are called without previous setup. The exception will have the name of the method/property:

var httpContext = new Mock<HttpContextBase>(MockBehavior.Strict);