DataTestMethod and DataRow attributes in MSTEST

c# unit-testing mstest
Simon Vane picture Simon Vane · Apr 10, 2013 · Viewed 46.3k times · Source

I have seen in a Microsoft video about Visual Studio update 2 regarding these attributes. However, I can't find any other information about them and can't get a project to build with them.

Does anyone know anything about these attributes or how to get them working?

[DataTestMethod]
[DataRow("a", "b")]
[DataRow(" ", "a")]
public void TestMethod1(string value1, string value2)
{
    Assert.AreEqual(value1 + value2, string.Concat(value1, value2));
}

Answer

Tim picture Tim · Sep 18, 2017

I know this is an old question, but there is now a good walkthrough published at https://blogs.msmvps.com/bsonnino/2017/03/18/parametrized-tests-with-ms-test/

In a nutshell, you will need to install MSTest.TestFramework and MSTest.TestAdapter, and remove references to Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework. You can then indicate a parameterised test with the [DataTestMethod] attribute, and can add your parameters using the [DataRow] attribute, as per your example. The values from the [DataRow] attribute will be passed to the test method in the order in which they are specified.

Note that the values in the [DataRow] attribute must be primitives, so you can't use a DateTime or decimal for example. If you want them, you will have to work around this limitation (e.g. instead of having a DateTime parameter to represent a date, you could have three integer parameters representing year, month and day, and create the DateTime within the test body).

Related questions

How do I use Assert to verify that an exception has been thrown?

How do I use Assert (or other Test class?) to verify that an exception has been thrown?

Read More
How can we run a test method with multiple parameters in MSTest?

NUnit has a feature called Values, like below: [Test] public void MyTest( [Values(1,2,3)] int x, [Values("A","B")] string s) { // ... } This means that the test method will run six times: MyTest(1, "A") MyTest(1, "B") MyTest(2, "A") MyTest(2, "B") MyTest(3, "A") …

Read More
How can I write output from a unit test?

Any call in my unit tests to either Debug.Write(line) or Console.Write(Line) simply gets skipped over while debugging and the output is never printed. Calls to these functions from within classes I'm using work fine. I understand …

Read More