How to seed database data for integration testing in C#?

Question

I've been writing some integration tests recently against ASP.Net MVC controller actions and have been frustrated by the difficulty in setting up the test data that needs to be present in order to run the test.

For example, I want to test the "add", "edit" and "delete" actions of a controller. I can write the "add" test fine, but then find that to write the "edit" test I was am either going to have to call the code of the "add" test to create a record so that I can edit it, or do a lot of setup in the test class, neither of which are particularly appealing.

Ideally I want to use or develop an integration test framework to make it easier to add seed data in a reusable way for integration tests so that the arrange aspect of an arrange/act/assert test can focus on arranging what I specifically need to arrange for my test rather than concerning itself with arranging a load of reference data only indirectly related to the code under the test.

I happen to be using NHibernate but I believe any data seeding functionality should be oblivious to that and be able to manipulate the database directly; the ORM may change, but I will allways be using a SQL database.

I'm using NUnit so envisage hooking into the test/testfixture setup/teardown (but I think a good solution would potentially transferable to other test frameworks).

I'm using FluentMigrator in my main project to manage schema and seeding of reference data so it would be nice, but not essential to be able to use the FluentMigrator framework for a consistent approach across the solution.

So my question is, "How do you seed your database data for integration testing in C#?" Do you execute the SQL directly? Do you use a framework?

Answer 1

You can make your integration testing on Sql Server Compact, you will have a .sdf file and you can connect to it giving the file's path as connection string. That would be faster and easier to setup and work with.

Your integration test would not probably need millions of rows of data. You can insert your test data into your database and save it as TestDbOriginal.sdf.

When you are running your tests, just make a copy of this 'TestDbOriginal.sdf' and work on that copy, which is already seeded with data. If you want to test a specific scenario, you will need to prepare your data by calling some methods like add, remove, edit .

When you go production or performance testing, switch back to your original server version, be it Sql Server 2008 or whatever.