Unit testing the dependency injection

Question

I am using Autofac for IoC

Here is my container initiator class, which the responsibility is to register the dependencies.

 public class ContainerInit
 {
      public static IContainer BuildContainer()
      {
            var conFac = new ContainerFactory();
            var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
            builder.Register(conFac).As<IContainerFactory>().SingleInstance();
            builder.Register(c=> new MainClass(conFac)).As<IMainClass>().SingleInstance();
            builder.Register(c=> new Database(conFac)).As<IDatabase>().SingleInstance();
             var logger = LoggUtil.CreateLogger();
            builder.Register(logger).As<ILogger>().SingleInstance();

            var container = builder.Build();
            ContainerFactory.SetContainer(container);
            return container;
      }
 }

Problem with this approach is, I need to pass IContainerFactory to the constructor of every class I use in my application as follow

  public class MainClass: IMainClass
  {       
      private readonly ILogger _logger;
      private readonly IDatabase _db;
      public MainClass(IContainerFactory containerFactory)
      {
              _logger = containerFactory.GetInstance<ILogger>();  
              _db =  containerFactory.GetInstance<IDatabase>(); //example       
      }
      public AddDetails(Data data)
      {
        //do some business operations 
        _db.Add(data);
        _logger.Information("added");
      }
  }

So it is difficult to unit test these classes.

How can come up with a good solution?

Answer 1

A better approach would be to pass the dependencies you need in your class into your constructor:

public class MainClass : IMainClass
{       
    private readonly ILogger _logger;
    private readonly IDatabase _db;

    public MainClass(ILogger logger, IDatabase db)
    {
        _logger = logger;  
        _db = db;
    }

    public void AddDetails(Data data)
    {
        //do some business operations 
        _db.Add(data);
        _logger.Information("added");
    }
}

Then you could use a mocking framework such as Moq to mock your class dependencies and perform verifications on whether the dependencies were called:

[TestClass]
public class UnitTest1
{
    private Mock<ILogger> _mockLogger = new Mock<ILogger>();
    private Mock<IDatabase> _mockDb = new Mock<IDatabase>();

    [TestMethod]
    public void TestMethod1()
    {
        // arrange
        var mainClass = new MainClass(_mockLogger.Object, _mockDb.Object);
        var data = new Data();

        // act
        mainClass.AddDetails(data);

        // assert    
        _mockDb
            .Verify(v => v.Add(data), Times.Once);
    }
}

I would not verify your log message though as this could change and make the test brittle. Only verify functionality which is essential to doing what the method is intended for.