Mocking WebResponse's from a WebRequest

Question

I have finally started messing around with creating some apps that work with RESTful web interfaces, however, I am concerned that I am hammering their servers every time I hit F5 to run a series of tests..

Basically, I need to get a series of web responses so I can test I am parsing the varying responses correctly, rather than hit their servers every time, I thought I could do this once, save the XML and then work locally.

However, I don't see how I can "mock" a WebResponse, since (AFAIK) they can only be instantiated by WebRequest.GetResponse

How do you guys go about mocking this sort of thing? Do you? I just really don't like the fact I am hammering their servers :S I dont want to change the code too much, but I expect there is a elegant way of doing this..

Update Following Accept

Will's answer was the slap in the face I needed, I knew I was missing a fundamental point!

• Create an Interface that will return a proxy object which represents the XML.
• Implement the interface twice, one that uses WebRequest, the other that returns static "responses".
• The interface implmentation then either instantiates the return type based on the response, or the static XML.
• You can then pass the required class when testing or at production to the service layer.

Once I have the code knocked up, I'll paste some samples.

Answer 1

I found this question while looking to do exactly the same thing. Couldn't find an answer anywhere, but after a bit more digging found that the .Net Framework has built in support for this.

You can register a factory object with WebRequest.RegisterPrefix which WebRequest.Create will call when using that prefix (or url). The factory object must implement IWebRequestCreate which has a single method Create which returns a WebRequest. Here you can return your mock WebRequest.

I've put some sample code up at http://blog.salamandersoft.co.uk/index.php/2009/10/how-to-mock-httpwebrequest-when-unit-testing/