DateTime Calculation and Unit Tests

net comments edit

I just had an interesting unit test failure I haven’t seen before due to DateTime calculation.

The code under test was roughly like this:

public Lifetime GetTokenLifetime(int seconds)
{
  return new Lifetime(DateTime.UtcNow, DateTime.UtcNow.AddSeconds(seconds));
}

The unit test was also pretty straightforward:

[Test]
public GetTokenLifetime_ExpectedLifetime()
{
  var provider = new Provider();
  var lifetime = provider.GetTokenLifetime(120);
  Assert.AreEqual(120, lifetime.Seconds);
}

The test was intermittently failing… and the error pretty much explained why:

Expected: 120
Actual: 120.0000063d

There was just a tiny fraction of a second happening between the first DateTime.UtcNow call and the second DateTime.UtcNow call.

To fix it, I stored the DateTime in a local variable.

public Lifetime GetTokenLifetime(int seconds)
{
  var now = DateTime.UtcNow;
  return new Lifetime(now, now.AddSeconds(seconds));
}

Something to keep in the back of your mind as you’re working with DateTime - or times in general. If you are setting up a date range based on a fixed point, best to store that fixed point somewhere and reuse it.

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