In this article, I want to take a look at a scenario that I came across this week which I’ve come across a few times. Occasionally, you will have an interface that you wish to mock out with Moq and find you have troubles because the method signature takes a ref or an out parameter. This week, I’ve found a way that we can successfully mock the method without too much of a change to the test code.
Lets assume that we have the following implementation that we want to mock out using Moq, which is a simplification of the problem I had earlier in the week:
public interface IVisitor
{
bool Visit(ref MyType type);
}
Here’s the class that we are going to test:
public class MyVisitorRunner
{
private readonly IEnumerable<IVisitor> _visitors;
public MyVisitorRunner(IEnumerable<IVisitor> visitors)
{
_visitors = visitors;
}
public bool Visit(ref MyType type)
{
foreach (var visitor in _visitors)
if (!visitor.Visit(ref type))
return false;
return true;
}
}
We want to have a simple test that ensures that all the visitors are called. So using XUnit, we could write something along the lines of:
[Fact]
public void MustCallAllVisitors()
{
var visitor1 = new Mock<IVisitor>();
var visitor2 = new Mock<IVisitor>();
visitor1.Setup(x => x.Visit(ref It.IsAny<MyType>())).Returns(true);
visitor2.Setup(x => x.Visit(ref It.IsAny<MyType>())).Returns(true);
var target = new MyVisitorRunner(new [] { visitor1.Object, visitor2.Object });
var subject = new MyType();
target.Visit(ref subject);
visitor1.Verify(x => x.Visit(ref It.IsAny<MyType>()), Times.Once);
visitor2.Verify(x => x.Visit(ref It.IsAny<MyType>()), Times.Once);
}
But this gives us the compile time error of A ref or out value must be assignable to a variable. So if we take a look at what happens when we do as the compiler says and assign it to a variable:
[Fact]
public void MustCallAllVisitors()
{
var visitor1 = new Mock<IVisitor>();
var visitor2 = new Mock<IVisitor>();
var type = It.IsAny<MyType>();
visitor1.Setup(x => x.Visit(ref type)).Returns(true);
visitor2.Setup(x => x.Visit(ref type)).Returns(true);
var target = new MyVisitorRunner(new [] { visitor1.Object, visitor2.Object });
var subject = new MyType();
target.Visit(ref subject);
visitor1.Verify(x => x.Visit(ref type), Times.Once);
visitor2.Verify(x => x.Visit(ref type), Times.Once);
}
It now compiles correctly, but when the tests execute you receive the following error:
Moq.MockException
Expected invocation on the mock once, but was 0 times: x => x.Visit(null)
Performed invocations:
Mock<IVisitor:1> (x):
IVisitor.Visit(MyType)
at Moq.Mock.Verify(Mock mock, LambdaExpression expression, Times times, String failMessage) in C:\projects\moq4\src\Moq\Mock.cs:line 354
at Moq.Mock`1.Verify[TResult](Expression`1 expression, Func`1 times) in C:\projects\moq4\src\Moq\Mock.Generic.cs:line 880
Moq version 4.8 (or later) has improved support for by-ref parameters by introducing It.Ref<T>.IsAny which works on ref, in (since they are by-ref parameters) and out parameters. We can use this changing our code to visitor1.Setup(x => x.Visit(ref It.Ref<MyType>.IsAny)).Returns(true); as shown below:
[Fact]
public void MustCallAllVisitors()
{
var visitor1 = new Mock<IVisitor>();
var visitor2 = new Mock<IVisitor>();
visitor1.Setup(x => x.Visit(ref It.Ref<MyType>.IsAny)).Returns(true);
visitor2.Setup(x => x.Visit(ref It.Ref<MyType>.IsAny)).Returns(true);
var target = new MyVisitorRunner(new [] { visitor1.Object, visitor2.Object });
var subject = new MyType();
target.Visit(ref subject);
visitor1.Verify(x => x.Visit(ref It.Ref<MyType>.IsAny), Times.Once);
visitor2.Verify(x => x.Visit(ref It.Ref<MyType>.IsAny), Times.Once);
}
If we now run our tests, we see that it works as we expect, fixing the original issue. As the same approach works for in and out parameters, I’ll leave this as an exercise for you dear reader. I hope that you’ve found this little tip help, happy mocking!