Unit testing with Synthesis - blipson89/Synthesis GitHub Wiki

Versions of Synthesis prior to v7 would generate classes that had concrete field types, such as RichTextField, that were strongly tied to the Sitecore item APIs or search APIs. This prevented easily creating mock versions of the class for testing purposes. Synthesis 7 changes that by allowing you to define both a private concrete field type mapping and and public interface mapping, such as this:

[IndexField("title")]
public ITextField Title {
    get { return new TextField(/* ... */);
}

Now each field can be easily mocked with a mocking framework of your choice, enabling you to create totally Sitecore API free instances of Synthesis items. For example, using Moq:

var item = new Mock<IFooItem>();
item.SetupGet(x => x.Title).Returns(new TestTextField("isn't this nice?"));

string result = item.Object.Title.RawValue; // "isn't this nice?"

But wait! What about those pesky metadata properties like statistics, database, and editing? Those are annoying, huh. Well Synthesis 7 uses adapter classes to make those mockable too.

public IDatabaseAdapter Database { get; }

It's very easy to add a public interface to a field type mapping; you simply add an interface attribute to the mapping:

<map field="Single-Line Text" type="Synthesis.FieldTypes.TextField, Synthesis" interface="Synthesis.FieldTypes.Interfaces.ITextField, Synthesis" />

There is now a Synthesis.Testing package on NuGet that contains some dummy field type implementations to help you write cleaner mocks of Synthesis item types. The TestTestField class referred to in the Moq example above is part of the testing package.

Martijn Bos has written a blog post about using Synthesis' testing capabilities with Sitecore MVC