Unit Testing With Entity Framework and Entity Framework Core 2.1

Entity Framework Core 2.1 comes with a nifty little feature: an In Memory Database setting. What this means, is that with a single option setting, your tests can interact directly with the database (or at least EF’s impression of the database) but not actually touch any physical database. In other words, you can write unit tests for data access; an example:

// Arrange
DbContextOptions<ApplicationDbContext> options = new DbContextOptionsBuilder<ApplicationDbContext>()
    .UseInMemoryDatabase(Guid.NewGuid().ToString())
    .EnableSensitiveDataLogging()                
    .Options;

using (var context = new ApplicationDbContext(options))
{
    context.Database.EnsureDeleted();
	ResourceCategory resourceCategory = new ResourceCategory()
    {
        Name = "TestCategory"
    }
 
    // Act
    \_applicationDbContext.ResourceCategories.Add(resourceCategory);
    \_applicationDbContext.SaveChanges();
};	
 
// Assert                
Assert.Equal("TestCategory", context.ResourceCategories.First().Name);               

To just quickly explain what this is doing: we have a DbContext called ApplicationDbContext and we’re building a set of options on top of that context. We’re then instantiating the context and cleaning the in memory database. Finally, we’re adding a new piece of data to the context and then asserting that it has been added.

Told you it was nifty.

But what about if you’re still using Entity Framework 6?

Glad you asked.

Out of the box, EF does not come with this kind of functionality; however, I recently came across (and contributed) to a NuGet library that provides just such a facility. It provides a wrapper for both Moq and Nsubstitute. The GitHub Repo is here.