Set User property for an ApiController in Unit Tes

Question

My unit tests for an ApiController uses some helpers methods to instantiate the controller:

public static ResourcesController SetupResourcesController(HttpRequestMessage request, IResourceMetadataRepository repo, IUnitOfWorkService unitOfWorkService)
{
    var config = new HttpConfiguration();
    var defaultRoute = config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(RouteNames.DefaultApi , "api/{controller}/{id}");
    var routeData = new HttpRouteData(defaultRoute, new HttpRouteValueDictionary { { "controller", "resources" } });

    var resourcesController = new ResourcesController(repo, unitOfWorkService)
    {
        ControllerContext = new HttpControllerContext(config, routeData, request),
        Request = request
    };
    resourcesController.Request.Properties.Add(HttpPropertyKeys.HttpRouteDataKey, routeData);
    resourcesController.Request.Properties[HttpPropertyKeys.HttpConfigurationKey] = config;

    // Compilation fail: The Property 'System.Web.Http.ApiController.User' has no setter.
    resourcesController.User = myStubUserPrincipal;

    return resourcesController;
}

My question is: how to set the User property for the controller?

I've tried:

request.Properties.Add("MS_UserPrincipal", myStubUserPrincipal);

But this doesn't work either (the resourcesController.User property remains null).

Answer 1

Set the Thread.CurrentPrincipal, and that will initialize the User property in the controller automatically.

For people that see this answer, but have no idea how to set CurrentPrincipal.: This code is extracted from MSDN.

Thread.CurrentPrincipal = new GenericPrincipal
(
   new GenericIdentity("Bob", "Passport"),
   new[] {"managers", "executives"}
);

Answer 2

A cleaner way would be to mock away IPrincipal and HttpRequestContext, for example using Moq:

var userMock = new Mock<IPrincipal>();
userMock.Setup(p => p.IsInRole("admin")).Returns(true);
userMock.SetupGet(p => p.Identity.Name).Returns("tester");
userMock.SetupGet(p => p.Identity.IsAuthenticated).Returns(true);

var requestContext = new Mock<HttpRequestContext>();
requestContext.Setup(x => x.Principal).Returns(userMock.Object);

var controller = new ControllerToTest()
{
    RequestContext = requestContext.Object,
    Request = new HttpRequestMessage(),
    Configuration = new HttpConfiguration()
};