What's the proper approach to testing controllers in Laravel? - php

Question

I'm rewriting an existing Laravel 4 application to ensure that there is adequate testing. Long story short, I've rewritten my AccountController class using TDD methods and I'm running into a bit of a headache.
Consider the following method that renders a page including a list of users:
public function getIndex()
{
// build the view
//
return \View::make('account.list-users')
->with('users', \Sentry::getUserProvider()->findAll());
}
I'm using Smarty to render my views and Sentry for authentication.
Now, I want to write some tests like this:
public function test_getIndex()
{
// arrange
//
// set up some mocks here...
// act
//
$response = $this->client->request("GET", "/list-users");
// assert
//
// test for <table class="table">
$this->assertFalse($response->filter("table.table")==null, "table not found");
// test for some <a> tags for the "update" buttons
$element = $response->filter("td a")->first()->extract(array("href", "class", "_text"));
$this->assertTrue(strstr($element[0][0],"/my-update-url")!="");
$this->assertTrue(strstr($element[0][1],"btn btn-xs btn-success")!="");
$this->assertTrue(strstr($element[0][2],"Active")!="");
// test for some other markup...
}
I've been following Jeffrey Way's book Laravel Testing Decoded and written tests like the one above, and they work fine.
The headache comes up in the "set up some mocks here..." section. Specifically, the number of mocks I need to set up is ridiculous. This is because, as part of a larger web application, I'm using a View composer which adds data to the View model: the current user model, a menu structure, alert messages, news messages, the application version number, etc. I've cut out much of this by using a "bare bones" template for testing, but it's still a lot of stuff - to the point where I'm writing hundreds of lines of code to test this simple one-line method.
Is there a better way of doing this?
The way I see it, there are two ways of doing this:
A. The way I have been doing it
B. Mocking the \View::make call so that all of my template rendering is bypassed - something like this
public function test_getIndex()
{
// arrange
//
$userList = "this is a list of users";
$userProvider = Mockery::mock("\Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\Eloquent\Provider");
\Sentry::shouldReceive("getUserProvider")
->once()
->andReturn($userProvider);
$userProvider->shouldReceive("findAll")
->once()
->andReturn($userList);
$view = Mockery::mock("\Illuminate\View\View");
\View::shouldReceive("make")
->with("account.list-users")
->once()
->andReturn($view);
$view->shouldReceive("with")
->with("users", $userList)
->once()
->andReturn($view);
$view->shouldReceive("render")
->once()
->andReturn("results");
// act
//
$response = $this->call("GET", "/list-users");
// assert
//
$this->assertResponseOk();
}
If I take this approach, the testing is much simpler and I'm only testing the code that's actually in the controller method, but then I'm not really testing everything involved in calling that route (which might be a good thing or might not - I'm not sure) and I worry that I won't get adequate coverage.
So, what's the best way of doing this: (A), (B), or something else?
Edit
There's a fair amount of confusion on my part regarding the testing of my controller method, made clearer by #TheShiftExchange's answer & comments below. I'm going to try to address the issue here, as an edit, because it gives me a little more room to discuss the question.
Consider the second example given in the answer below:
public function testMethod()
{
$this->call('GET', '/list-users');
$this->assertViewHas('users', \Sentry::getUserProvider()->findAll());
}
If I run this test, it will work, but it will access the database, which I was trying to avoid by mocking some stuff.
So, I could expand this test a little:
public function testMethod()
{
\Sentry::shouldReceive("getUserProvider")
->once()
->andReturn($userProvider);
// plus a mock of the UserProvider class,...
$this->call('GET', '/list-users');
$this->assertViewHas('users', \Sentry::getUserProvider()->findAll());
}
This test will not work because, in addition to the mocks that are required for the controller method, I'll also need mocks for the code in my View composer. This code includes, among other things, $currentUser = \Sentry::getUser() (the user's name is displayed in the upper right hand corner of my application's pages).
So the code actually becomes:
public function testMethod()
{
\Sentry::shouldReceive("getUserProvider")
->once()
->andReturn($userProvider);
// plus a mock of the UserProvider class,...
// plus a mock of ThisClass
// and a mock of ThatClass
// and a mock of SomeOtherClass
// etc.
// etc.
$this->call('GET', '/list-users');
$this->assertViewHas('users', \Sentry::getUserProvider()->findAll());
}
And it quickly gets out of hand.
This suggests to me that I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what. I suspect that the problem stems from my uncertainty about what exactly I'm testing here.
So, after all that, the question becomes this:
What am I really trying to test when I'm testing a controller's methods?
The code in the controller's method? Or,
The whole process from request to response?
What I want to test is the first item - just the code in the controller method. The example in my question is pretty simple, but I do have some controller methods that do things like form validation or redirect based on user input - I'd like to test that code.
Maybe, rather than testing the code via $this->call(), I need to simply call the controller method directly?

Answer 1

As part of the Laravel framework, it includes some testing helpers. Including in these helpers are view testing helpers:
Asserting A View Has Some Data
public function testMethod()
{
$this->call('GET', '/');
$this->assertViewHas('name');
$this->assertViewHas('age', $value);
}
So you could do something like:
public function testMethod()
{
\Sentry::shouldReceive("getUserProvider")
->once()
->andReturn('foo');
$this->call('GET', '/');
$this->assertViewHas('users', 'foo');
}