PeterKellner.net

* I’m adding this comment after the post has been written to let anyone coming here know of another great post that goes further to explain no only what I’ve done here, but also two other ways including Mock and using Json Serialization.  The Post is written by Ashic Mahtab, aka “HeartattacK” on the forums.  His well written and informative article is here:  ASP.NET MVC – Unit Testing JsonResult Returning Anonymous Types.

This post will show how to return a simple Json result from an ASP.NET MVC 2.0 web project.  It will show how to test that result inside a unit test and essentially pick apart the Json, just like a JavaScript (or other client) would do.  It seems like it should be very simple (and indeed, once you see the answer it is), however there are lots of length discussions on the forums about this with all kinds of positives and negatives.  The one I based my solution on is from Stack Overflow and is here..  My personal length discussion that did not really yield a satisfactory answer is here.

If you follow my method, you’ll be able to unit test a JsonResult created by an MVC asp.net web application.

Cutting to the chase, I choose Vladimir Bodurov’s Color Formatter!

For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a project that uses Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC for providing data to our pure JavaScript application.  That is, there are no web forms, no dynamic HTML generation, just 100% JavaScript running on the client.  I’m using a library called ExtJS which gives us high quality “forms like” user interactions and MVC for getting the data.  That is, the Application looks like this:

The data retrieval URL used by the JavaScript look like: