Unit testing writing to HttpWebRequest's request stream

Question

I'm back filling some unit tests in our app at work, and came across the following method.

public virtual void WriteBodyToRequestStream(HttpWebRequest webRequest, byte[] redirectBodyBuffer) {
    var requestStream = webRequest.GetRequestStream();
    requestStream.Write(redirectBodyBuffer, 0, redirectBodyBuffer.Length);
    requestStream.Close();
}

I'm trying to write a simple test that inserts some text in the stream. The problem I'm having is figuring out how to verify the text after it's written into the stream. Here's what I have so far.

[Test, Ignore("not working yet")]
public void Should_write_to_request_stream()
{
    var request = WebRequest.Create("http://localhost/") as HttpWebRequest;
    request.Method = "POST";
    var encoding = new System.Text.UTF8Encoding();
    var bytes = encoding.GetBytes("testing");
    _helper.WriteBodyToRequestStream(request, bytes);

    var stream = request.GetRequestStream() as MemoryStream;
    var result = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ToArray());

    Assert.AreEqual("testing", result);
}

When I run this test, the stream var is null.

Answer 1

do you really need to pass HttpWebRequest to your WriteBodyToRequestStream method? You really don't care about the HttpWebRequest its more the stream you are interested in:

public virtual void WriteBodyToRequestStream(Stream requestStream , byte[] redirectBodyBuffer) {
//var requestStream = webRequest.GetRequestStream(); remove this line.
requestStream.Write(redirectBodyBuffer, 0, redirectBodyBuffer.Length);
requestStream.Close();
}

This makes your method easily testable (whether its a unit test or integration test I will leave up for discussion ;P)