Unit Tests

While setting up a Go project for database access using the PostgreSQL database I was looking for an efficient way to quickly unit test different database access functions without a lot of extra setup or time for each test. Also to make the tests more useful it helps if the actual Postgres drivers and database is used.

For this purpose I found an interesting Go package called txdb that’s described as a Single transaction based sql.Driver for Go. It allows to run a series of SQL commands in a test that get automatically rolled back after the test is complete. This allows the next test to start with pristine database conditions to keep the test independent. In practice I found this very useful and it helped me more quickly develop a correct database schema and database access code.

I recently wrote about a framework for Versioning ASP.Net Web API. Continuing on the theme of versioning API’s, I researched how to test the different versions of a Web API, both for unit tests and SpecFlow acceptance tests.

Overview

As a quick review, the SDammann.WebApi.Versioning package was used for versioning the API and provides methods for selecting the controller that is active for a particular version of the API. At the code level the controller is selected by the name space of the particular version of the controller, e.g. Appname.Controllers.Version1. As mentioned in the last post, care must be taken to avoid unnecessary duplication in the controllers. Likewise the same duplication concerns apply for testing and relevant techniques will be reviewed in this post.