Creating Strings With AutoFixture by Mark Seemann
As previously hinted, AutoFixture creates primitive types like strings, numbers, etc. using special algorithms.
In this post, I'll describe the default algorithm for strings. If you don't like this particular algorithm, you can replace it with your own.
If you don't care about the created string at all, you can just create it like this:
string anonymousText = fixture.CreateAnonymous<string>();
The algorithm is simply to create a new Guid and convert it to a string, so that anonymousText will have a value like “f5cdf6b1-a473-410f-95f3-f427f7abb0c7”. Obviously, you don't know exactly which value will be returned, but that's the whole point of Constrained Non-Determinism.
When I create string values as Explicit Expectations, I prefer that the Assert failure message contains some sort of hint for me, so I can instead provide a hint to the CreateAnonymous method:
string anonymousName = fixture.CreateAnonymous("Name");
This overload is still generic, but since I provide a string as input, type inferencing takes care of the rest.
This is still going to create a Guid, but will now prepend the hint, giving a string like “Name30a35da1-d681-441b-9db3-77ff51728b58”.
Now, when my test fails, I'll get an error message equivalent to
"Assert.AreEqual failed. Expected:<Namef2b1f55b-e9dc-4aac-a1ab-128dc80d3b71>. Actual:<ploeh>. Boo hiss"
which I find marginally more informative than if the hint hadn't been there.
In a future post, I'll explain how you can replace this algorithm with something else.
