Unit testing custom Microsoft Dynamics CRM code – Part 5 (custom workflow activities)

by Lucas Alexander

In the last three posts of this series, I showed how to unit test Microsoft Dynamics CRM C# interfaces code with mock objects using Visual Studio 2012 and Moq. In this post, I will show how to unit test custom workflow activities that are executed by Dynamics CRM processes. I will be using the regular expression validation custom workflow activity I showed in my "Using regular expressions in Dynamics CRM 2011 processes" post.

Setting up the projects

First, you need to set up a project for the custom workflow activity. In Visual Studio create a new class library project called DemoCrmWorkflowActivities and add references to the following assemblies:

  1. System.Activities
  2. System.ServiceModel
  3. System.Runtime.Serialization
  4. System.Text.RegularExpressions
  5. Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk (browse to the .dll in the CRM SDK)
  6. Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Workflow (browse to the .dll in the CRM SDK)

Once that's done, you need to add a new unit test project to the solution. Go to the add project menu, and select the test->unit test project type. Following the <PROJECT-BEING-TESTED>.Test naming convention, the test project should be called DemoCrmWorkflowActivities.Test. Once that project is created, add references to the following assemblies:

  1. System.Runtime.Serialization
  2. Moq (browse to the Moq.dll you downloaded for the earlier examples)
  3. Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk (browse to the .dll in the CRM SDK)
  4. Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Workflow (browse to the .dll in the CRM SDK)

Also, make sure to add a reference to the DemoCrmWorkflowActivities project. Otherwise you won't be able to call the methods you want to test in your test methods.

The method to test

Because I am using a custom workflow activity that I had discussed in my "Using regular expressions in Dynamics CRM 2011 processes" post, I'm not going to go into the code in a lot of detail here. Basically, the custom workflow activity does the following:

  1. Accept a string to validate and a regular expression match pattern via input arguments.
  2. Evaluate the regular expression.
  3. Return the result of the match via an output argument.

The test method

In my test project, I have a method to test a valid phone number and another method to test an invalid phone number. Let's take a look at the code that makes up test for the valid phone number:

First, we can't run the custom workflow activity's Execute method directly, so we need to use a WorkflowInvoker object. We can set up the invoker like this:

//get new validateregex object
ValidateRegex valRegex = new ValidateRegex();
//instantiate the workflowinvoker
var invoker = new WorkflowInvoker(valRegex);

Because the custom workflow activity executes inside Dynamics CRM, the WorkflowInvoker object expects several extensions that we need to mock using Moq. They are:

  1. CRM tracing service
  2. CRM workflow context
  3. CRM organization service factory

Here's how we mock each of those:

//create our mocks
var serviceMock = new Mock<IOrganizationService>();
var factoryMock = new Mock<IOrganizationServiceFactory>();
var tracingServiceMock = new Mock<ITracingService>();
var workflowContextMock = new Mock<IWorkflowContext>();
//set up a mock service to act like the CRM organization service
IOrganizationService service = serviceMock.Object;
//set up a mock workflowcontext
var workflowUserId = Guid.NewGuid();
var workflowCorrelationId = Guid.NewGuid();
var workflowInitiatingUserId = Guid.NewGuid();
workflowContextMock.Setup(t => t.InitiatingUserId).Returns(workflowInitiatingUserId);
workflowContextMock.Setup(t => t.CorrelationId).Returns(workflowCorrelationId);
workflowContextMock.Setup(t => t.UserId).Returns(workflowUserId);
var workflowContext = workflowContextMock.Object;
//set up a mock tracingservice - will write output to console
tracingServiceMock.Setup(t => t.Trace(It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<object[]>())).Callback<string, object[]>((t1, t2) => Console.WriteLine(t1, t2));
var tracingService = tracingServiceMock.Object;
//set up a mock servicefactory
factoryMock.Setup(t => t.CreateOrganizationService(It.IsAny<Guid>())).Returns(service);
var factory = factoryMock.Object;

We then add them to the WorkflowInvoker Extensions collection:

invoker.Extensions.Add<ITracingService>(() => tracingService);


invoker.Extensions.Add<IWorkflowContext>(() => workflowContext);


invoker.Extensions.Add<IOrganizationServiceFactory>(() => factory);

Once all the setup work is done, we can pass our input parameters and call the custom activity:

//set matchpattern to nanp format of xxx-xxx-xxxx
string matchPattern = @"^[2-9]\d{2}-\d{3}-\d{4}__aSyNcId_<_RKFAEQuA__quot;;
//set string to validate to a valid phone number
string stringToValidate = "334-867-5309";
var inputs = new Dictionary<string, object> 
{
	{ "MatchPattern", matchPattern},
	{ "StringToValidate", stringToValidate }
};
var outputs = invoker.Invoke(inputs);
int valid = Convert.ToInt16(outputs["Valid"]);

Finally, we use a simple assertion just like in the previous examples to check the output is as we expect:

//0 = invalid, 1 = valid


Assert.AreEqual(1, valid);

The code samples for this example can be downloaded here, and the testing code can be downloaded here.

In my next post, I’ll show how to unit test a Microsoft Dynamics CRM plug-in.

A version of this post was originally published on the HP Enterprise Services Application Services blog.