Unit testing JsonResult with Nested Anonymous Types

Recently I had a need to test some controller actions that returned nested anonymous types. Since the Data property on the JsonResult is of type object this can involve jumping through some hoops with reflection to get access to the properties in the anonymous types.  My first attempt was to simply serialize the object, then deserialize it to an anonymous type. This worked, but I found that my nested types were JObjects and I needed to use cast and convert these to the actual type.

public class TestContext
{
    // remainder omitted
    
    public dynamic ToDynamicObject(object obj, object anonymousTemplate)
    {
        var serialized = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(obj);
        return JsonConvert.DeserializeAnonymousType(serialized, anonymousTemplate);
    }
}

Used as

var model = _c.ToDynamicObject(result.Data, new { success = true, data = new SubModel() });

var subModel = ((JObject)model.data).ToObject<SubModel>();

I found one solution at http://blog.m0sa.net/2011/02/mvc-unit-testing-jsonresult-actions.html which seemed to improve upon this by using a wrapper class that implements DynamicObject. This got me very close to what I wanted except, again, the nested anonymous objects themselves had to be wrapped individually. Here using my initial implementation of an extension method that used it.

var model = result.Data.AsDynamic();

var cardModel = ((object)model.data).AsDynamic() as SubModel;

To fix this I added a bit of code to the wrapper class so that the result of TryGetMember was an anonymous type, it created and returned a DynamicObject wrapper around it. To test if the type was anonymous I used the code found at http://www.liensberger.it/web/blog/?p=191 (referenced from this Stack Overflow question, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2483023/how-to-test-if-a-type-is-anonymous)

Here’s the final implementation as extensions to object.  Note: these are internal to my test project so the restriction to object doesn’t bother me too much. JsonResult.Data has that type and that was the problem I was trying to solve.

internal static class ObjectExtensions
{
    public class DynamicWrapper : DynamicObject
    {
        private readonly Type _subjectType;
        private readonly object _subject;

        public static dynamic Create(object subject)
        {
            return new DynamicWrapper(subject);
        }

        private DynamicWrapper(object subject)
        {
            _subject = subject;
            _subjectType = subject.GetType();
        }

        public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result)
        {
            try
            {
                var propertyInfo = _subjectType.GetProperty(binder.Name);

                var getter = propertyInfo.GetGetMethod();

                result = getter.Invoke(_subject, null);

                if (result.IsAnonymous())
                {
                    result = Create(result);
                }
                return true;
            }
            catch
            {
                result = null;
                return false;
            }
        }
    }

    public static bool IsAnonymous(this object obj)
    {
        if (obj == null)
        {
            return false;
        }

        var type = obj.GetType();

        return Attribute.IsDefined(type, typeof(CompilerGeneratedAttribute), false)
                  && type.IsGenericType && type.Name.Contains("AnonymousType")
                  && (type.Name.StartsWith("<>") || type.Name.StartsWith("VB$"))
                  && (type.Attributes & TypeAttributes.NotPublic) == TypeAttributes.NotPublic;
    }

    public static dynamic AsDynamic(this object obj)
    {
        return DynamicWrapper.Create(obj);
    }
}

And the above code sample now becomes much cleaner and I am much happier:

var model = result.Data.AsDynamic();

var subModel = model.data as SubModel;