.NET Framework Dependency Injection How Dependency Injection Makes Unit Testing Easier
Example
This builds on the previous example of the Greeter class which has two dependencies, IGreetingProvider and IGreetingWriter.
The actual implementation of IGreetingProvider might retrieve a string from an API call or a database. The implementation of IGreetingWriter might display the greeting in the console. But because Greeter has its dependencies injected into its constructor, it's easy to write a unit test that injects mocked versions of those interfaces. In real life we might use a framework like Moq, but in this case I'll write those mocked implementations.
public class TestGreetingProvider : IGreetingProvider
{
public const string TestGreeting = "Hello!";
public string GetGreeting()
{
return TestGreeting;
}
}
public class TestGreetingWriter : List<string>, IGreetingWriter
{
public void WriteGreeting(string greeting)
{
Add(greeting);
}
}
[TestClass]
public class GreeterTests
{
[TestMethod]
public void Greeter_WritesGreeting()
{
var greetingProvider = new TestGreetingProvider();
var greetingWriter = new TestGreetingWriter();
var greeter = new Greeter(greetingProvider, greetingWriter);
greeter.Greet();
Assert.AreEqual(greetingWriter[0], TestGreetingProvider.TestGreeting);
}
}
The behavior of IGreetingProvider and IGreetingWriter are not relevant to this test. We want to test that Greeter gets a greeting and writes it. The design of Greeter (using dependency injection) allows us to inject mocked dependencies without any complicated moving parts. All we're testing is that Greeter interacts with those dependencies as we expect it to.
