Best Practice for using Lists of Objects in Tests? - unit-testing

Question

I'm using MSTest to retrofit unit testing in our application. A number of our tests will use a mocked list of objects (classes) that would normally come from our database. I'd like to save this list in the test project and then read the list, as necessary, for each test that needs it. Is there a best practice for doing this? BTW, these lists could contains hundreds or thousands of items.

Answer 1

For such cases, I would use data driven tests.
Look at the example at msdn site http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182527.aspx

Answer 2

There are two solutions at least
Deserialize JSON to domain objects
Using library Json.Net you could deserialize text file contains JSON into hierarhy of objects
var hierarchy = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Root>(testJson)
See complete example here
Benefits
Easy to edit
Complex hierarhy supported
Test data could be stored in separate text files
Drawbacks
Could be quite complex to track changes at domain object with time
No schema supported
NDbUnit is a .NET library for managing database state during testing
In case if you involved ORM during your tests, you could load data using NdbUnit to SQLite from XML file that created according to database XSD
SQLiteConnection connection = boundSession.GetConnection();
using (var cmd = new SQLiteCommand("PRAGMA foreign_keys = OFF", connection))
{
cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
}
var sqlLiteUnitTest = new SqlLiteDbUnitTest(connection);
sqlLiteUnitTest.ReadXmlSchema(xsdFile);
sqlLiteUnitTest.ReadXml(xmlDataFile);
sqlLiteUnitTest.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.CleanInsertIdentity);
using (var cmd = new SQLiteCommand("PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON", (SQLiteConnection)connection))
{
cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
}
See complete example here
Benefits
Much easy to handle a lot of data, because of XSD
Suitable for complex integration test suites and supports differents SQL engines
Drawbacks
This is integration testing, not unittesting
XSD usually contains only objects from database
You need to keep XSD up to date, and be able to regenerate XML in case of XSD changes