Recommended structure for testing Javascript with QUnit in ASP.NET

Question

I have a standard ASP.NET MVC (version 2 preview 2) solution with the actual project and server-side unit tests in separate projects.

Because this project is very client-side heavy, I want to make a ClientTest project as well that uses QUnit to test the main project.

I've thought of creating a regular ASP.NET webforms project with a single HTML file that would load the various scripts in my Scripts/ directory and test them with QUnit. Unfortunately this will spawn another ASP.NET Development Server. I could configure the port of the running MVC project server before running the tests, but there's got to be a better way that isn't just throwing the test html file into the main MVC project.

Does anyone know of a better way of going about this?

Answer 1

I like your idea of placing the QUnit tests in a separate project. What about using XCOPY to copy the scripts in the pre-build event?

Say your MVC project is MyProj.Web and your QUnit test project is MyProj.ClientTest (replace with your project names).

• Create a Scripts folder in your ClientTest project.

• From Project > MyProj.ClientTest Properties > Build Events, add the following to Pre-build event command line:

  XCOPY "$(SolutionDir)MyProj.Web\Scripts" "$(ProjectDir)Scripts" /S /Y

• Then in your HTML just include the appropriate JavaScript files from the Scripts folder.

Note: You will have to rebuild your ClientTest project to refresh JavaScript files when you want to rerun tests. Adjust folder names, paths and XCOPY options as needed.

Answer 2

Perhaps you could pick and choose techniques from this article, including using the command-line, harnessing NUnit with WatiN, and scraping test results for reporting. This solution wouldn't require a separate WebForms project to harness the tests in, since it's all handled by WatiN.