I'm working on tests for a Symfony2 project, and right now I'm looking for a way to create tests involving entity objects without persisting them. The problem is: id is a private field and there is no setter for that. I can create new object and set some properties, but I can't test anything involving getId() calls.
$entity = new TheEntity();
// Can't set ID!
$entity->setProperty('propertyValue');
$name = $entity->getProperty(); // OK
$id = $entity->getId(); // not OK - null
The resolutions I'm aware of:
- Initializing whole kernel (Symfony's WebTestCase::createKernel()) and persisting the entities
- Creating a mock object for every entity, that will return valid ID
- Hacks like static method in TheEntity class returning initialized object, or adding setter for id field
What is the recommended way to deal with this, how to obtain an entity for testing in clean and fast way, with set ID?
Edit
Turned out I can solve this with mocking... sorry, I'm still learning. I was looking for a clean, standard, yet fast way to get things done. However I forgot about second parameter of getMock()
- that is I don't have to mock every method of the entity I am going to use. I wanted to avoid multiple ->expects()->method()->will()
etc. And this is achieved by adding: array('getId')
. This helper method solves the problem:
protected function getEntityMock($entityClass, $id)
{
$entityMock = $this->getMock($entityClass, array('getId'));
$entityMock
->expects($this->any())
->method('getId')
->will($this->returnValue($id));
return $entityMock;
}
When creating many entities of the same class, things can be of course simplified more by more helper methods like this one:
protected function getTheEntityMock($id)
{
return $this->getEntityMock('\The\NameSpace\TheEntity', $id);
}
The only limitation is that the entity itself cannot use id
property, only getId()
getter.
Any valuable input is still welcome, but I belive PHPUnit's getMock()
solved this well.