Unit Testing Zend Controller and Mocking some of the performed actions - php

Question

I'm writing some unit tests (PHPUnit 3.6) for my controllers and want to verify that the correct actions etc.. are being fired. This is easy enough. However some of the controllers also perform certain actions via models that are undesirable such as inserting records into a database.
I am aware I need to mock these but am unclear how to do this. Taking the following example controller (cut down for clarity):
public function addAction()
{
$data = $this->getRequest()->getPost();
$model = $this->getModelFactory()->getCompetitionModel()->insert($data); }
}
Note, all I want to do is verify that the correct controller and action have been dispatched but do not want the record actually inserted. Likewise I have equivalents for delete etc.. I don't want records actually deleted.
What actually needs mocking here? The competition Model, the database adapter, or the model factory, or all three? How do I inject these? I have tried (again cut down for brevity):
public function testAddActionIsDispatched()
{
$this->request->setMethod('POST');
$this->request->setPost(array($data…));
$modelMock = $this->getMockBuilder('Competition_Adder')
->disableOriginalConstructor()
->getMock();
$factoryMock = $this->getMockBuilder('ModelFactory')
->disableOriginalConstructor()
->getMock();
// Configure the stub.
$factoryMock->expects($this->any())
->method('getCompetitionModel')
->will($this->returnValue($modelMock));
$modelMock->expects($this->once())
->method('insert')
->will($this->returnValue(true));
$this->dispatch('/mymodule/add/');
$this->assertController('test');
$this->assertAction('add');
$this->assertResponseCode(200);
}
}
It was my understanding that PHPUnit magically substituted any references to the originals with the mocks so that when the dispatch was called the fake mocks are used in their place. This isn't happening. Can someone please clarify how this is achieved?

Answer 1

It looks like your mocks are set up correctly. I actually didn't know you could return mocks from mocks until I saw your question and researched it a bit.
What's happening here is that you need to make the method getModelFactory() return an instance of your mock factory. Right now it just returns the real thing.
I'm not sure what happens in your getModelFactory method, so it is hard for me to say how you could override it to make it return your mock factory.
But maybe you don't have to override it. In my ZF app, I don't test controllers, but to test stuff that requires saving stuff to my models, I just change to a test database in my configuration file for testing. I use Doctrine1.2, so I just start a transaction in the setUp() method and a rollback in the tearDown method().
My test database is completely empty, and I basically create the necessary data in each test method with some test specific factory classes. The drawback is it does seem to use a lot of memory. I think it hits 200MB on about 140 tests and not all of these require database access.
I just use this method since it is the easiest for me to implement since I only had to change the database config. If you're not working a very large scale project, this may work for you. You could also run your tests against a test database using sqlite in memory, which should work for you since are not testing the database in your test. The data just gets inserted and then at the end of test, it's gone. In my project, I use a MySQL test database, because I wanted it be as close to what is in production as possible.
Example (You're probably not using Doctrine. I'm just illustrating how I use transactions and rollback to keep my test database in a consistent state):
public function setUp()
{
$this->bootstrap = new Zend_Application(
APPLICATION_ENV, APPLICATION_CONFIG);
parent::setUp();
$bootstrap = $this->bootstrap->getBootstrap();
$this->_conn = Doctrine_Manager::connection();
$this->_conn->beginTransaction();
}
public function tearDown()
{
$this->_conn->rollback();
$this->_conn->close();
}

Answer 2

Yep, check out the previous answer. I can agree in all cases. But the same thing can't be implemented with MySQL and Zend_Db. That's because Zend_Db doesn't have nested transactions.
So the only thing you can do is to use test database and rebuild it after each tests.
Check out how it is done via Codeception testing framework with Zend Framework and Db module.