Ian Oxley

Quite often, when buying books off Amazon, you can sometimes get them cheaper by going to a marketplace seller’s own website. That’s how I came across The Book Depository, where I have bought a few books recently.

One nice UX feature that I like on this site was the way in which they highlight where to find your credit card CVV/security number depending on which credit card you are using:

Visa card with CVV number highlighted

The image above shows the security number highlighted on the signature strip when you select Visa from the credit card type drop-down list. Compare that with the screenshot below showing the security number highlighted on the front of the card when American Express is selected:

AMEX card with the CVV number highlighted

It’s a simple feature really, but nicely implemented.

When writing unit tests with SubSonic’s new built-in testing for ActiveRecord don’t forget that each time you call the Setup() method on your ActiveRecord object it adds records to any that have already been created. For example:

[Test]
public void Foo_Bar() {
    Foo.Setup(10);
    Assert.AreEqual(10, Foo.All().Count());
}

[Test]
public void Bar_Foo() {
    Foo.Setup(10);

    // This will fail: Foo.All().Count() will return 20
    Assert.AreEqual(10, Foo.All().Count());
}

To reset your test repositories you will need to call the ResetTestRepo() method prior to each test, which can be accomplished easily enough by adding the method call to your test’s [SetUp] method:

[SetUp]
public void SetUp() {
    Foo.ResetTestRepo();
}

[Test]
public void Foo_Bar() {
    Foo.Setup(10);
    Assert.AreEqual(10, Foo.All().Count());
}

[Test]
public void Bar_Foo() {
    Foo.Setup(10);

    // Now Foo.All().Count() will return 10 and the test will pass
    Assert.AreEqual(10, Foo.All().Count());
}

Hopefully this will save you a bit of time, as well as head scratching :p