During the last few months I was very busy with my Master Thesis. Now the project is almost finish and I can spend more time on my blog and helping in the community. Yay! While implementing my project for the Master Thesis I’ve learned a lot about Unit Testing with Sitecore and I realised how easy and fast you can write them. This blog post should show you in a very simple example how you can test your Sitecore Fast Queries.

When you decide not to use the Sitecore Content Search, then Sitecore Fast Queries are a common way of querying items from the Sitecore database. A good example would be a news application, where the news should be filtered by year. The following method will return all news items available under /sitecore/content/News in a given year:

public class NewsRepository
{
    public virtual IEnumerable<Item> GetNews(int year)
    {
        // generate the search query
        var query = string.Format("fast:/sitecore/content/News/*[@Date >= '{0}' and @Date <= '{1}']",
            DateUtil.ToIsoDate(new DateTime(year, 1, 1)),
            DateUtil.ToIsoDate(new DateTime(year, 12, 31)));

        // get items from the database
        return Sitecore.Context.Database.SelectItems(query);
    }
}

One year ago, I thought this is pretty much impossible to test. But no, it isn’t. It’s even very easy, when using Sitecore.FakeDb. FakeDb allows you to fake the Sitecore database and build a database in memory. So you only need to build a fake database and everything else is handled by FakeDb. First you need to install Sitecore.FakeDb into your test project (see introductions here). Then we create a simple static method to fake our database. The start point of the fake database is /sitecore/content, so the first item added is directly under this path. The following example shows how to add three news entries under /sitecore/content/News (with a different data of course):

private static Db GetDatabase()
{
    var db = new Db();
    var root = new DbItem("News");

    var news1 = new DbItem("News 1") { { "Title", "News 1" }, { "Date", DateUtil.ToIsoDate(new DateTime(2015, 4, 2)) } };
    root.Add(news1);

    var news2 = new DbItem("News 2") { { "Title", "News 2" }, { "Date", DateUtil.ToIsoDate(new DateTime(2015, 12, 20)) } };
    root.Add(news2);

    var news3 = new DbItem("News 3") { { "Title", "News 3" }, { "Date", DateUtil.ToIsoDate(new DateTime(2014, 2, 10)) } };
    root.Add(news3);

    db.Add(root);

    return db;
}

The unit test then simply needs to use this database and call the method in the repository:

[Test]
public void GetNewsTest()
{
    using (var database = GetDatabase())
    {
        // arrange
        var newsRepository = new NewsRepository();

        // act
        var news = newsRepository.GetNews(2015);

        // assert
        Assert.IsNotNull(news);
        Assert.AreEqual(2, news.Count());
    }
}

That’s it! You see, also when using the Sitecore.Context directly in your code (which is usually the case when you don’t use some ORM like Glass Mapper), it’s possible to test your code. With FakeDb you can test almost every code you have in your solution (also some old legacy code).