Testing for Exceptions using the Arrange Act Assert Pattern in C# 7

March 14, 2017

Unit testing massively benefits from following the Arrange / Act / Assert pattern. I’ve seen tests that are not written in this way, and they can be sprawling and indecipherable, either testing many different things in series, or testing nothing at all except the .Net Framework.

I recently found an issue while trying to test for an exception being thrown, which is that Nunit (and probably other frameworks) test for an exception by accepting a delegate to test. Here’s an example:



        [Test]
        public void Test\_ThrowException\_ExceptionThrown()
        {
            // Arrange
            TestClass tc = new TestClass();

            // Act / Assert
            Assert.Throws(typeof(Exception), tc.ThrowException);
        }

We’re just testing a dummy class:



    public class TestClass
    {
        public void ThrowException()
        {
            throw new Exception("MyException");
        }
    }

C# 7 - Inline functions

If you look in the references at the bottom, you’ll see something more akin to this approach:



        public void Test\_ThrowException\_ExceptionThrown2()
        {
            // Arrange
            TestClass tc = new TestClass();

            // Act
            TestDelegate throwException = () => tc.ThrowException();            

            // Assert
            Assert.Throws(typeof(Exception), throwException);
        }

However, since C# 7, the option on a local function has arrived. The following has the same effect:



        [Test]
        public void Test\_ThrowException\_ExceptionThrown3()
        {
            // Arrange
            TestClass tc = new TestClass();

            // Act
            void CallThrowException()
            {
                tc.ThrowException();
            }

            // Assert
            Assert.Throws(typeof(Exception), CallThrowException);
        }

I think that I, personally, still prefer the anonymous function for this; however, the local function does present some options; for example:




        [Test]
        public void Test\_ThrowException\_ExceptionThrown4()
        {
            void CallThrowException()
            {
                // Arrange
                TestClass tc = new TestClass();

                // Act
                tc.ThrowException();
            }

            // Assert
            Assert.Throws(typeof(Exception), CallThrowException);
        }

Now I’m not so sure that I still prefer the anonymous function.

References

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33897323/nunit-3-0-and-assert-throws

https://pmbanugo.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/exception-testing-pattern/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24070115/best-approach-towards-applying-the-arrange-act-assert-pattern-when-expecting-exc