XUnit Assertion for checking equality of objects

Question

I am using XUnit framework to test my C# code.

Is there any assert method available in this framework which does the object comparison? My intention is to check for equa

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, but since I stumbled upon it I figured I'd weigh in with a new solution that's available (at least in xunit 2.3.1 in a .net Core 2.0 solution).

I'm not sure when it was introduced, but there is now an overloaded form of .Equal that accepts an instance of IEqualityComparer as the third parameter. You can create a custom comparer in your unit test without polluting your code with it.

The following code can be invoked like this: Assert.Equal(expectedParameters, parameters, new CustomComparer());

XUnit natively appears to stop processing a test as soon as a failure is encountered, so throwing a new EqualException from within our comparer seems to be in line with how XUnit works out of the box.

public class CustomComparer : IEqualityComparer
{
    public bool Equals(T expected, T actual)
    {
        var props = typeof(T).GetProperties(BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);
        foreach (var prop in props)
        {
            var expectedValue = prop.GetValue(expected, null);
            var actualValue = prop.GetValue(actual, null);
            if (!expectedValue.Equals(actualValue))
            {
                throw new EqualException($"A value of \"{expectedValue}\" for property \"{prop.Name}\"",
                    $"A value of \"{actualValue}\" for property \"{prop.Name}\"");
            }
        }

        return true;
    }

    public int GetHashCode(T parameterValue)
    {
        return Tuple.Create(parameterValue).GetHashCode();
    }
}

Edit: I found that comparing the actual and expected values with != was not effective for certain types (I'm sure there's a better explanation involving the difference between reference types and value types, but that's not for today). I updated the code to use the .Equals method to compare the two values and that seems to work much better.