PeanutButter TempDb gets LocalDb support

PeanutButter.TestUtils.Generic contains a lot of stuff, including TempDb<>, a generic abstract class which can be used to create temporary database instances and two derivatives, TempDbSqlite and TempDbSqlCe which, as the names might suggest, provide temporary databases of the Sqlite and SqlCe flavours.

Tonight, I added TempDbLocalDb which uses SQL Server's LocalDB mode (as is the default mechanism for MVC web applications. Whilst this does seem to take a little longer to spin up, it means that your tests can now have full SQLServer support with a temporary database which is automatically cleaned up as your tests end.

TempDb<> implements IDisposable, so the natural flow would be something like:

using (var db = new TempDbLocalDb())
{
    var connection = db.CreateConnection();
    connection.Open(); // if you need it open first
    // do stuff with the connection
    // for example, create an Entity context using the DbConnection
}

Thanks to Andrew Russell for the idea and pointing me at some resources (http://blog.developers.ba/localdb-for-database-integration-testing-in-asp-net-5-project-and-xunit-net/) which got me going.

You can install via nuget with:

install-package peanutbutter.testutils.generic

Hope this is of use to someone. Whilst it's true that providing a repository layer, for example, and mocking out data get/set operations is a lot faster (and probably better design), there are times when you just have to test against a database engine (for example, when testing that your database migrations work and that your entity models align with your migrated database structures... you are testing that, aren't you?)

Update (2015/06/03):  the TempDb packages have (finally) been split out and swept up so you don't have to install all of the providers you're not using. Check out the post here: http://davydm.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-little-peanutbutter-housekeeping.html