testing Razor views in ASP.Net MVC

Question

We have a quite large web-application in ASP.Net MVC, which has a good amount of views. Starting the application takes quite some time, due to application initialisation logic, etc.

Is there any way to 'test' a view, without actually having to 'start' the web-application in Visual Studio? The idea is to be able to mock the Model and pass in a custom model, and check that the view renders correctly. The view is also using Master Layouts, so that would be something that needs to be considered. We are wasting a lot of time going through the start/stop process of the application, and would like to see if there is actually any other way forward.

Answer 1

Hmm. We use Selenium WebDriver with Specflow to test the best part of our site. We do this as part of a full regression test suite that we can run at the flick of a button with our CI server (Team City).

You may also want to consider using PhantomJS, http://phantomjs.org/ . This will give you faster results as there's not browser involved.

Other than that, I don't know of anything built in to/on top of MVC specifically that can aid you.

If you've a large volume start by breaking your site down and workout what the most important parts are. I would look to focus on those first to validate your testing process.