Testing DI bootstrappers

While your Dependency Injection bootstrappers - being responsible for gluing your application together - are a vital part of your application, they are seldom put under test. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be though. The cost of these tests is negligible, definitely if you compare it to the cost of the often catastrophical outcome of bugs in your bootstrappers.

I encourage you to take a look at the commit history of your DI bootstrappers; I bet they change a lot. Wouldn't it be nice to have a set of tests that proves that the dependency container still behaves like you expect it to at runtime? Next to proving correctness, I think writing these tests also helps you discover various behaviours of your DI container, which is a valuable investment in itself.

Let me show you a few tests that I wrote to put my ASP.NET MVC Ninject bootstrapper under test.

I started by opening up the Ninject bootstrapper, making the CreateKernel method public.

public static IKernel CreateKernel()
{
    var kernel = new StandardKernel();
    
    kernel.Bind<IEntryService>().To<EntryService>();

    return kernel;
}

In the test class, I used the TestInitialize attribute to initialize a new instance of the kernel before every test. I'm not sure this is really necessary, but I want to avoid that my tests experience side-effects of a previous test.

[TestInitialize]
public void Setup()
{         
    _kernel = NinjectMVC3.CreateKernel();
}        

Needless to say, the first test should prove that an implementation of the IEntryService interface can be resolved. The behaviour I observed while playing with this case, is that Ninject throws a Ninject.ActivationException when the implementation can't be resolved.

Ninject.ActivationException: Error activating IEntryService
  No matching bindings are available, and the type is not self-bindable.
  Activation path:
Request for IEntryService

Suggestions:

1. Ensure that you have defined a binding for IEntryService.
2. If the binding was defined in a module, ensure that the module has been loaded into the kernel.
3. Ensure you have not accidentally created more than one kernel.
4. If you are using constructor arguments, ensure that the parameter name matches the constructors parameter name.
5. If you are using automatic module loading, ensure the search path and filters are correct.

So to test whether an implementation can be resolved, I just make sure no exceptions are thrown on resolving the dependency.

[TestMethod]
public void Test_IEntryService_Can_Be_Resolved()
{
    AssertDoesNotThrowWhenResolved<IEntryService>();
}

The AssertDoesNotThrowWhenResolved method is a helper method which tries to resolve a dependency of T and asserts that no exceptions are thrown while doing so. The assertion is borrowed from Xunit (package available on Nuget).

private void AssertDoesNotThrowWhenResolved<T>() 
{
    Xunit.Assert.DoesNotThrow(() => _kernel.Get<T>());
}

A second useful test is testing the lifetime of the resolved implementation. For most of my dependencies, I expect a new instance every time they are resolved. This test looks like this.

[TestMethod]
public void Test_IEntryService_Is_New_Instance()
{
    AssertNewInstanceIsResolved<IEntryService>();
}

The AssertNewInstanceIsResolved method is another helper method which resolves two instances of T and asserts they are not the same.

private void AssertNewInstanceIsResolved<T>()
{
    var instance = _kernel.Get<T>();
    var secondInstance = _kernel.Get<T>();

    Assert.AreNotSame(instance, secondInstance);
}  

That's it. While these tests are very cheap to write, they do provide great value. I can imagine testing more complex bindings, like contextual bindings, taking a bit more time to set up, but the value of these tests increases proportionally.

Do you put your DI bootstrappers under test? If you don't, why not?