NancyFX Testing with an authenticated user

I’ve been trying NancyFx lately and ran across a bit of a misunderstanding on my part and a minor missing point in the Nancy documentation. I’m testing my modules and some require authentication. By way of:

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this.RequiresAuthentication();

The Authentication documentation for Nancy states that if the NancyContext.CurrentUser property is null then the current request has not been authenticated otherwise the request has been authenticated. Well, not quite. Nancy checks that CurrentUser property for null. It also checks that the UserName property is not empty. So be sure that your identity has the UserName set which is almost always the case.

But for testing I usually setup the minimum amount of data required to keep the distractions as low as possible. What I also do for testing is create a custom bootstrapper just for use in my tests.

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public class BootstrapperWithLoggedInUser : MyApplicationCustomBootstrapper
{
    protected override void RequestStartup(TinyIocContainer container, IPipelines pipelines, NancyContext context)
    {
        base.RequestStartup(container, pipelines, context)

        context.CurrentUser = new MyApplicationUserIdentity() { UserName = "Douglas Adams" };
    }
}

That bootstrapper sets up every request with a logged in user. So I don’t have to do it on every request in my tests on the BrowserContext.FormsAuth. What I initially did in the bootstrapper was not specify a UserName for the current user. Everything kept getting redirected to the login page. Once I set the username everything started working correctly in my tests.

For those that may be interested the code in Nancy that does the actual checking for an authenticated user is the UserIdentityExtensions.cs file in Nancy.Security.