Unit Testing (xUnit) an ASP.NET Mvc Controller with a custom input model?
- by Danny Douglass
I'm having a hard time finding information on what I expect to be a pretty straightforward scenario. I'm trying to unit test an Action on my ASP.NET Mvc 2 Controller that utilizes a custom input model w/ DataAnnotions. My testing framework is xUnit, as mentioned in the title.
Here is my custom Input Model:
public class EnterPasswordInputModel
{
[Required(ErrorMessage = "")]
public string Username { get; set; }
[Required(ErrorMessage = "Password is a required field.")]
public string Password { get; set; }
}
And here is my Controller (took out some logic to simplify for this ex.):
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult EnterPassword(EnterPasswordInputModel enterPasswordInput)
{
if (!ModelState.IsValid)
return View();
// do some logic to validate input
// if valid - next View on successful validation
return View("NextViewName");
// else - add and display error on current view
return View();
}
And here is my xUnit Fact (also simplified):
[Fact]
public void EnterPassword_WithValidInput_ReturnsNextView()
{
// Arrange
var controller = CreateLoginController(userService.Object);
// Act
var result = controller.EnterPassword(
new EnterPasswordInputModel
{
Username = username, Password = password
}) as ViewResult;
// Assert
Assert.Equal("NextViewName", result.ViewName);
}
When I run my test I get the following error on my test fact when trying to retrieve the controller result (Act section):
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!