Can you override Date.Now or Date.Today for debugging purposes in an ASP.NET web application?

Question

We have a very massive system where reports are run off dates from specific days through to today's date using various definitions of "GenerateSalesReport(DateStart, Date.Now)".

For debugging purposes, I want to simulate reports that occurred in the past so I need to change the object "Date.Now" to a specific date from the past on my development environment. Is it possible to override date.Now?

Answer 1

That is one of the failings of DateTime.Now and related functions.

You should be passing in a DateTime to any function that relies on it. Any place you use DateTime.Now or DateTime.Today (and such) is a place where you should be passing in the date.

This allows you to test for different DateTime values, will make your code more testable and remove the temporal dependency.