Creating Professional DSC Resources – Part 6

The purpose of this series of articles is to try and document a few of the lessons I learned while releasing new DSC resources as well as contributing to the existing Microsoft Community DSC resources. These articles are not intended to tell you how to write DSC resources from a programming perspective, but to give you some ideas on what might be expected of a DSC resource you’re releasing to the public. For example, unit and integration tests (don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with those terms).

These articles are also not intended to tell you what you must do to release your resource, but more document what will help your resource be easier to use and extend by other people. Some of these these things are obvious for people who have come from the development community, but may be quite new to operations people.

If you missed any previous articles you can find them here:

 

Recap

In the last couple of articles I covered the importance of automated testing and covered unit testing in particular (I’ll get to integration testing later). I had covered creating new unit tests using the unit test templates that are available here (although they will probably move here). I also covered how to complete the Pester Test Initialization and the Get-TargetResource and Set-TargetResource function areas of the unit test.

 

Unit Testing Completion

The final task in completing the unit tests is to complete the **Set-TargetResource ** in tests and also optionally tests for any other supporting functions your DSC Resource may have required.

In these unit tests I am using a DSC Resource for creating iSCSI Virtual Disks to illustrate the process. You don’t need to know anything about iSCSI Virtual Disks to understand these articles or resources, but if you’re interested to know the cmdlets I’m using for these, see this page. I’m using the *_iSCSIVirtualDisk cmdlets in this DSC Resource.

Function Test-TargetResource

This area will contain the actual Pester tests that test the Test-TargetResource function. These are fairly similar to the Set-TargetResource except we will be checking these two things:

  1. The output of the Test-TargetFunction is correct. E.g. it returns false if changes are required, which will cause Set-TargetFunction to be called.
  2. The expected Mocks are called by the Function.

This area may contain a large number of tests depending on the complexity of your DSC Resource. In most cases, you should expect there to create the tests from the following list, but often you will need even more for 100% code coverage:

  • Does the function return false when the resource being configured does exist and should, but one of the configured parameters does not match the current values? This test is usually repeated for each parameter in the DSC Resource.
  • Does the function return true when the resource being configured does exist and should, and all the configured parameters match the current values?
  • Does the function return false when the resource being configured does not exist but should?
  • Does the function return false when the resource being configured does exist but should not?
  • Does the function return true when the resource being configured does not exist and should not?

The bottom four of these tests are very similar. So I’ll only show examples of the top two contexts here.

Context ‘Virtual Disk exists and should but has a different …’

In this scenario we Mock the Get-iSCSIVirtualDisk cmdlet to return the object we defined in the Pester Test Initialization section. This is the behavior we’d expect if the resource being configured does exist:

This context will perform two tests:

  1. Should return false - The Test-TargetResource should return false because we are changing the Description parameter so that the resource will require changes (e.g. Set-TargetResource should be called).
  2. Should call the expected mocks - The Test-TargetResource should call the mocked cmdlets the expected number of times. In all contexts in this function this will always be just once.

The purpose of cloning the $TestVirtualDisk object is so we can modify the properties to simulate a property difference without modifying the $TestVirtualDisk object.

You should expect to repeat this context for each parameter that might be different.

 

Context ‘Virtual Disk does not exist but should’

In this scenario we Mock the Get-iSCSIVirtualDisk cmdlet to return nothing. This is the behavior we’d expect if the resource being configured does not exist:

As you can see, there is not too much different with these tests and you shouldn’t have any problems figuring out the remaining ones. Just remember, the goal is always to get 100% code coverage.

 

Unit Testing Supporting Functions

It is quite common that you might have implemented some supporting functions in your DSC Resource. These supporting functions are usually called by your standard *-TargetResource functions. If that is the case there are two important things you should do:

  1. Write unit tests that cover all code paths in your supporting functions.
  2. Add mocks to your *-TargetResource unit tests that prevent any constructive/destructive cmdlets that exist in your supporting functions from being called.

The first item is fairly self explanatory. For example, I often implement a get-* function in my DSC Resources which is used to pull the actual objects that will be used by the *-TargetResource functions (e.g. Get-VirtualDisk):

To unit test this function I’d write unit tests that tested the following contexts:

  1. Context ‘Virtual Disk does not exist’
  2. Context ‘Virtual Disk does exist’

For example:

As you can see, there isn’t much to it.

Earn a Chocolate Fish: If you look at the above supporting function and unit tests carefully, you’ll notice that I haven’t got 100% code coverage on it!

To get 100% code coverage I would have had to implement a unit test that covered the situation where the Get-iSCSIVirtualDisk function threw an exception that wasn’t a [Microsoft.Iscsi.Target.Commands.IscsiCmdException] exception.

In case you’re wondering, the Get-iSCSIVirtualDisk function throws a [Microsoft.Iscsi.Target.Commands.IscsiCmdException] when the cmdlet is called with the path parameter set to a path that does not contain a valid iSCSI Virtual Hard Disk file.

 

Unit Testing Exceptions

When creating unit tests you’ll often need to test a scenario where the function that is being tested is expected to throw an exception. If you read the Pester documentation, you’d might write a test for an exception like this:

This would of course will work. It will ensure that the code throws an exception in this situation. The problem is we aren’t really sure if it is the exception that we expected it to throw. It could have been thrown by some other part of our code.

So to improve on this we need to do things:

  1. Customize the exception that is thrown.
  2. Change the unit test so that it checks for the customized exception.

 

Customize the Exception

To create a custom exception we need to create a new exception object containing our custom error message. The exception object is then used to create a custom Error Record:

In the above code, you just need to customize the $errorId and $errorMessage variables. The $errorId should just contain a simply string identifier for this particular type of error, but the $errorMessage can contain a full description of the error, including related parameters.

Once you’ve created the $errorRecord object you can call the ThrowTerminatingError method of the $PSCmdLet object, passing the $errorRecord object as the parameter.

Important: the $PSCmdLet object is only available in Functions that include the [CmdletBinding()] function attribute. So ensure your *-TargetResource and supporting functions include this attribute if you want to be able to access this object.

 

Test for the Customized Exception

To test for the custom exception object we need to create an identical object in the unit test and test for it:

The above code creates an identical exception object to the one produced by the exception in our DSC Resource code. The exception object can then be passed to the should throw cmdlet. If a different exception is thrown by the code then the test will fail - it will only pass if the exception object is exactly the same.

Important: Make sure both the $errorId and $errorMessage variables are exactly the same as what would be produced by the code when your unit test calls it. This includes ensuring that if your $errorMessage contains any parameters that the unit test $errorMessage contains the same parameter values.

 

That about completes creating unit tests. After you’ve implemented a few unit tests you’ll no doubt come up with your own method of implementing them, but hopefully this has given you a place to start.

 

Up Next - Integration Tests

In the next article, I’ll cover the integration tests. There are often the most difficult to implement, but if you can take the time to implement them then your DSC Resources are guaranteed to be extremely robust and bugs are far less likely to slip through.

Further parts in this series: