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I have a method that gets an RSS feed using LINQ to XML and returns a collection of an object that grabs only the data I need. There's really only one other method in the class I'm concerned about that you'll see in the sample -- RemoveUrlNoise.

How do I test a method like this or change it to be more testable?

 public IEnumerable<PostDetails> GetPostDetails(string rssUrl) { XElement feed = XElement.Load(rssUrl); var items = from item in feed.Elements("channel").Elements("item") select item; return items.Select(item => new PostDetails { Title = item.Element("title").Value, Url = RemoveUrlNoise(item.Element("guid").Value), PubDate = item.Element("pubDate").Value }).OrderBy(i => i.PubDateAsDateTime).ToList(); }
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1 Answer 1

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Separate the concerns of fetching the feed XML from parsing it by extracting a class (e.g. FeedReader) to do the reading. Your IFeedReader would be generically reusable and look something like:

public interface IFeedReader { XElement Load(string url); }

with implementation

public class FeedReader : IFeedReader { public XElement Load(string url) { return XElement.Load(url); } }

You then inject an IFeedReader through the constructor and use it to fetch the data in your method. This lets you use a Fake or a Mock of the IFeedReader, depending on your preference, to return appropriate results for your unit test.

consider reading up on: inversion of control (IoC) and dependency injection (DI), and mock object frameworks.

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