Ninject MockingKernel with Saboteurs

Question

Is it possible to use MockingKernel so that it generates mock objects automatically that, if interacted with, will throw an exception (a.k.a, saboteurs)?

This is useful when you want to get an object with various dependencies, but you know your code should only be interacting with some of them. If you don't explicitly Bind a dependency (via ToMock, etc.), it should return an object that throws an exception the first time it is interacted with.

This is much better than waiting until the code finishes executing, then writing a bunch of checks to make sure you didn't call into a mock.

Does this already exist?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 28 '16 at 21:29

The answer provided above did not indicate how to setup the Ninject MockingKernel using MOQ so that the default behavior is Strict. For the benefit of others, here is what I found.

The Ninject.MockingKernel.Moq namespace provides the class NinjectSettingsExtensions with the methods SetMockBehavior() and GetMockBehavior() that allow you to specify which mocking behavior to use as the global default. I have NOT been able to find any way to override the default for an individual GetMock() request.

using Ninject;
using Ninject.MockingKernel.Moq;
var kernelSettings = new NinjectSettings();
kernelSettings.SetMockBehavior(MockBehavior.Strict);
using(var kernel = new MoqMockingKernel(kernelSettings))
{
    var mockFoo = kernel.GetMock<IFoo>(); // mockFoo.Behavior == MockBehavior.Strict
}

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 11 '15 at 19:11

I had been using NSubstitute's implementation of MockingKernel. NSubstitute doesn't really support a "strict" mode and you can't configure it through the NSubstituteMockingKernel class.

However, you can configure Moq to do strict mode. Best of all, the MoqMockingKernel class allows you to change the mock behavior globally. This way, any calls that aren't configured result in an exception being thrown.

This is exactly what I was looking for. The only pain was switching from NSubstitute to Moq.

Ninject MockingKernel with Saboteurs

2 Answers2