The Bakery Everything CakePHP

Installation

First of all, you'll need to enable the test suite for your CakePHP 1.2 installation. After CakePHP is succesfully installed and configured, get the latest release of SimpleTest from its website, and uncompress it in either your cake/vendors or your app/vendors directory. You should have now a vendors/simpletest directory with all SimpleTest files and folders inside.

Make sure that you at least have a DEBUG level of 1 in your app/config/core.php file. Test your installation by running any of CakePHP core tests, pointing your browser to http://www.example.com/test.php.

About Fixtures

When testing models it is important to understand the concept of fixtures in CakePHP test suite. Fixtures are a way for you to define sample data that will be loaded in your models and will allow you to perform your testing. CakePHP uses its own settings for fixtures to not disrupt your real application data.

CakePHP will look at your app/config/database.php configuration file and test if the connection named $test is accessible. If so, it will use it to hold fixture data. Otherwise it will use the $default database configuration. On either case, it will add "test_suite" to your own table prefix (if any) to prevent collision with your existing tables.

CakePHP will perform different operations during different stages of your fixtured based test cases:

1. Before running the first test method in your test case, it will create the tables for each of your fixtures.
2. Before running any test method, it will optionally populate records for each of your fixtures.
3. After running each test method, it will empty each of your fixture tables.
4. After running your last test method, it will remove all your fixture tables.

Creating Fixtures

When creating a fixture you will mainly define two things: how the table is created (which fields are part of the table), and which records will be initially populated to the test table. Let's then create our first fixture, that will be used to test our own Article model. Create a file named article_test_fixture.php in your app/tests/fixtures directory, with the following content:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
class ArticleTestFixture extends CakeTestFixture {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    
    var $fields = array(
        'id' => array('type' => 'integer', 'key' => 'primary'),
        'title' => array('type' => 'string', 'length' => 255, 'null' => false),
        'body' => 'text',
        'published' => array('type' => 'integer', 'default' => '0', 'null' => false),
        'created' => 'datetime',
        'updated' => 'datetime'
    );
    var $records = array(
        array ('id' => 1, 'title' => 'First Article', 'body' => 'First Article Body', 'published' => '1', 'created' => '2007-03-18 10:39:23', 'updated' => '2007-03-18 10:41:31'),
        array ('id' => 2, 'title' => 'Second Article', 'body' => 'Second Article Body', 'published' => '1', 'created' => '2007-03-18 10:41:23', 'updated' => '2007-03-18 10:43:31'),
        array ('id' => 3, 'title' => 'Third Article', 'body' => 'Third Article Body', 'published' => '1', 'created' => '2007-03-18 10:43:23', 'updated' => '2007-03-18 10:45:31')
    );
}
?>

We use $fields to specify which fields will be part of this table, on how they are defined. The format used to define these fields is the same used in the function generateColumnSchema() defined on Cake's database engine classes (for example, on file dbo_mysql.php.) Let's see the available attributes a field can take and their meaning:

1. type: CakePHP internal data type. Currently supported: string (maps to VARCHAR), text (maps to TEXT), integer (maps to INT), float (maps to FLOAT), datetime (maps to DATETIME), timestamp (maps to TIMESTAMP), time (maps to TIME), date (maps to DATE), and binary (maps to BLOB)
2. key: set to primary to make the field AUTO_INCREMENT, and a PRIMARY KEY for the table.
3. length: set to the specific length the field should take.
4. null: set to either true (to allow NULLs) or false (to disallow NULLs)
5. default: default value the field takes.

We lastly can set a set of records that will be populated after the test table is created. The format is fairly straight forward and needs no further explanation.

Importing table information and records

Your application may have already working models with real data associated to them, and you might decide to test your model with that data. It would be then a duplicate effort to have to define the table definition and/or records on your fixtures. Fortunately, there's a way for you to define that table definition and/or records for a particular fixture come from an existing model or an existing table.

Let's start with an example. Assuming you have a model named Article available in your application (that maps to a table named articles), change the example fixture given in the previous section (app/tests/fixtures/article_test_fixture.php) to:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
class ArticleTestFixture extends CakeTestFixture {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    var $import = 'Article';
}
?>

This statement tells the test suite to import your table definition from the table linked to the model called Article. You can use any model available in your application. The statement above does not import records, you can do so by changing it to:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
class ArticleTestFixture extends CakeTestFixture {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    var $import = array('model' => 'Article', 'records' => true);
}
?>

If on the other hand you have a table created but no model available for it, you can specify that your import will take place by reading that table information instead. For example:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
class ArticleTestFixture extends CakeTestFixture {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    var $import = array('table' => 'articles');
}
?>

Will import table definition from a table called 'articles' using your CakePHP database connection named 'default'. If you want to change the connection to use just do:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
class ArticleTestFixture extends CakeTestFixture {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    var $import = array('table' => 'articles', 'connection' => 'other');
}
?>

Since it uses your CakePHP database connection, if there's any table prefix declared it will be automatically used when fetching table information. The two snippets above do not import records from the table. To force the fixture to also import its records, change it to:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
class ArticleTestFixture extends CakeTestFixture {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    var $import = array('table' => 'articles', 'records' => true);
}
?>

You can naturally import your table definition from an existing model/table, but have your records defined directly on the fixture as it was shown on previous section. For example:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
class ArticleTestFixture extends CakeTestFixture {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    var $import = 'Article';
    
    var $records = array(
        array ('id' => 1, 'title' => 'First Article', 'body' => 'First Article Body', 'published' => '1', 'created' => '2007-03-18 10:39:23', 'updated' => '2007-03-18 10:41:31'),
        array ('id' => 2, 'title' => 'Second Article', 'body' => 'Second Article Body', 'published' => '1', 'created' => '2007-03-18 10:41:23', 'updated' => '2007-03-18 10:43:31'),
        array ('id' => 3, 'title' => 'Third Article', 'body' => 'Third Article Body', 'published' => '1', 'created' => '2007-03-18 10:43:23', 'updated' => '2007-03-18 10:45:31')
    );
}
?>

Creating your test case

Let's say we already have our Article model defined on app/models/article.php, which looks like this:

Model Class:

Download code <?php 
class Article extends AppModel {
    var $name = 'Article';
    
    function published($fields = null) {
        $conditions = array(
            $this->name . '.published' => 1
        );
        
        return $this->findAll($conditions, $fields);
    }

}
?>

We now want to set up a test that will use this model definition, but through fixtures, to test some functionality in the model. CakePHP test suite loads a very minimum set of files (to keep tests isolated), so we have to start by loading our parent model (in this case the Article model which we already defined), and then inform the test suite that we want to test this model by specifying which DB configuration it should use. CakePHP test suite enables a DB configuration named test_suite that is used for all models that rely on fixtures. Setting $useDbConfig to this configuration will let CakePHP know that this model uses the test suite database connection.

Since we also want to reuse all our existing model code we will create a test model that will extend from Article, set $useDbConfig and $name appropiately. Let's now create a file named article.test.php in your app/tests/cases/models directory, with the following contents:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
loadModel('Article');

class ArticleTest extends Article {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    var $useDbConfig = 'test_suite';
}

class ArticleTestCase extends CakeTestCase {
    var $fixtures = array( 'article_test' );
}
?>

As you can see we're not really adding any test methods yet, we have just defined our ArticleTest model (that inherits from Article), and created the ArticleTestCase. In variable $fixtures we define the set of fixtures that we'll use.

Creating our first test method

Let's now add a method to test the function published() in the Article model. Edit the file app/tests/cases/models/article.test.php so it now looks like this:

PHP Snippet:

Download code <?php 
loadModel('Article');

class ArticleTest extends Article {
    var $name = 'ArticleTest';
    var $useDbConfig = 'test_suite';
}

class ArticleTestCase extends CakeTestCase {
    var $fixtures = array( 'article_test' );
    
    function testPublished() {
        $this->ArticleTest =& new ArticleTest();
        
        $result = $this->ArticleTest->published(array('id', 'title'));
        $expected = array(
            array('ArticleTest' => array( 'id' => 1, 'title' => 'First Article' )),
            array('ArticleTest' => array( 'id' => 2, 'title' => 'Second Article' )),
            array('ArticleTest' => array( 'id' => 3, 'title' => 'Third Article' ))
        );
        
        $this->assertEqual($result, $expected);
    }
}
?>

You can see we have added a method called testPublished(). We start by creating an instance of our fixture based ArticleTest model, and then run our published() method. In $expected we set what we expect should be the proper result (that we know since we have defined which records are initally populated to the article_tests table.) We test that the result equals our expectation by using the assertEqual method.

Running your test

Make sure that you at least have a DEBUG level of 1 in your app/config/core.php file, and then point your browser to http://www.example.com/test.php. Click on App Test Cases and find the link to your models/article.test.php. Click on that link.

If everything works as expected, you will see a nice green screen saying that your test succeded.