Upcasting vs. downcasting

I always seem to forget which is which so I guess I’ll write it down here once and for all.

Casting from a Circle or Rectangle to a Shape is upcasting, casting up in the hierarchy.

Casting from a Shape object to a Circle object is downcasting, casting down in the hierarchy. If you find yourself downcasting, it may be an indication of a code smell, think twice about it!

Changed name and moved

No, I didn’t join the witness protection program or anything like that, it’s not my name that changed, and I didn’t move. However I did change the name of the mock-/stub-/fake-framework Legend.Fakes to the – in my opinion – catchier FakeItEasy and I also moved the source to from CodePlex to Google code since the svn support is way better there.

The new location of the source is: http://code.google.com/p/fakeiteasy/

Fake wrappers (candy inside)

I added a new feature to FakeItEasy the other day, it lets you put a fake wrapper around a real instance. This means that all calls that are not explicitly configured to do anything different are delegated to the wrapped instance, this gives you the ability to fake out only a certain method on a fake.

For example, you might have a web service of some sort:

public interface IStoreService
{
    IEnumerable<IProduct> FindAllProducts();
    int BuyProduct(IProduct product);
}

public interface IProduct
{
    string ProductId { get; }
    decimal Price { get; }
}

Let’s say in an integration test of a class we are writing called PersonalShopper you want to run against an actual (let’s event say a sealed) implementation of this service, we can call it RidiculouslyOverPricedStore, but you want to fake out the BuyProduct-method so that nothing is actually booked in the remote system.

Here’s the PersonalShopper class we want to write an integration test for:

public class PersonalShopper
{
    private IStoreService store;

    public PersonalShopper(IStoreService store)
    {
        this.store = store;
    }

    public IProduct BuyMeSomething()
    {
        var productToBy =
            (from product in this.store.FindAllProducts()
             orderby product.Price
             select product).First();

        this.store.BuyProduct(productToBy);
    }
}

Here’s a test for this where we create a fake wrapping an instance of the RidiculouslyOverPricedStore-class, we then configure calls to the BuyProduct-method with any product to return 1 (this is meant to be the order id).

[Test]
public void Personal_shopper_buys_a_product()
{
    // Arrange
    var realStore = new RidiculouslyOverPricedStore();
    var fakedStore = A.Fake<IStoreService>(x => x.Wrapping(realStore));

    A.CallTo(() => fakedStore.BuyProduct(A<IProduct>.Ignored.Argument)).Returns(1);

    var shopper = new PersonalShopper(fakedStore);

    // Act
    var boughtProduct = shopper.BuyMeSomething();

    // Assert
    Assert.That(boughtProduct, Is.Not.Null);
}

Another case to use this feature is if you have a class that you want to use in your test that you don’t have to configure at all, but you still want to assert that a certain method was called, just wrap an instance, use it as normal without configuring it and use Fake.Assert to assert on it.