I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing something like this in production code however I find this useful when writing SpecFlow tests - I want the Gherkin to call out a few key properties of a class, then I want to generate a "valid" instance (to pass any validation) but using the test data supplied.
Imagine the following scenario:
public class Customer
{
public string Firstname { get; set; }
public string Surname { get; set; }
public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
}
public static class TestCustomerBuilder
{
private static readonly Fixture Fixture = new();
public static Customer AnyValidInstance()
{
return Fixture.Build<Customer>()
.With(c => c.EmailAddress, _fixture.Create<MailAddress>().Address)
.Create();
}
}
Now imagine you're writing some Gherkin that doesn't care about email - you're just testing something to do with Firstname and Surname, so you might write:
Given the create customer request contains the below details
| Firstname | Surname |
| Hello | World |
When the create customer endpoint is called
Then a new customer is created with the following details
| Firstname | Surname |
| Hello | World |
It's a contrived example, but you should see the point when it comes to implementing the step definitions I like to use the built in helpers from SpecFlow rather than "magic strings" as much as possible (as it makes the steps more re-usable) so how about the below:
[Given("the create customer request contains the below details")]
public void GivenTheCreateCustomerRequestContainsTheBelowDetails(Table table)
{
_testContext.CustomerRequest = table.CreateInstance<Customer>();
}
The problem with the above is the created instance won't be valid, on account of it having no email address. You could code around this by manually only setting certain properties but that introduces the re-usability problem again. Enter the "model combiner" which is designed to copy all non-null properties from a source instance to a destination instance, e.g.:
[Given("the create customer request contains the below details")]
public void GivenTheCreateCustomerRequestContainsTheBelowDetails(Table table)
{
var testDataInstance = table.CreateInstance<Customer>();
var validInstance = TestCustomerBuilder.AnyValidInstance();
ModelCombiner.Comine(testDataInstance, validInstance);
_testContext.CustomerRequest = validInstance;
}
Now the request contains a "valid" customer but also has our specific data taken from the Gherkin.
The model binder class looks as below (which I got from an idea seen here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8702603/merging-two-objects-in-c-sharp)
public static class ModelCombiner
{
private static readonly HashSet<Type> SupportedTypes = new();
private static Mapper Mapper { get; } = new(new MapperConfiguration(expression =>
{
Setup<Customer>(expression);
Setup<SomeOtherType>(expression);
}));
public static T Combine<T>(T source, T destination)
{
if (!SupportedTypes.Contains(typeof(T)))
throw new InvalidOperationException(
$"Cannot combined unsupported type {typeof(T).FullName}. Please add it to the setup in {nameof(ModelCombiner)}");
return Mapper.Map(source, destination);
}
private static void Setup<T>(IProfileExpression expression)
{
SupportedTypes.Add(typeof(T));
expression.CreateMap<T, T>()
.ForAllMembers(opts => opts
.Condition((_, _, srcMember) => srcMember != null));
}
}
Another option I found online that looks worth a look:
https://github.com/kfinley/TypeMerger