Mocking DateTime.Now

coreycoogan — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:09:37 +0000

The problem is simple. You have written some code that does some date calculation, comparison, etc. using DateTime.Now. Now you want to write a unit test against some scenario to make sure the code acts as expected. The question is how to do this in a repeatable, automated test environment? For a single run or two, you may try to simply set your system date to the desired value and run your test, but that has some obvious limitations.

One idea that I really like comes from Ayende in a blog post that’s almost a year old. His solution is so simple and elegant – create a static method that returns Func, which allows you to specify a default and easily override the value in a test with a new expression.

public static class SystemTime
{
     public static Func Now = () => DateTime.Now;
}

Now rather than use DateTime.Now, use SystemTime.Now. To override the value in a test it’s simple:

SystemTime.Now = () => new DateTime(2000,1,1);

Corey Coogan » Unit Test

Mocking DateTime.Now