On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 5:43 PM, Madhura Jayaratne <madhura.cj(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Ayush Chaudhary <ayushchd(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi,
I have been writing Unit Tests for classes and libraries under
libraries/config/*. For isolation between different libraries, its preferred
to mock certain functions. Since some of the code is functional, I tried to
convert (for a start) libraries/config/validate.lib.php into a class with
static methods.
However, the issue here is that mocking static methods is not really
possible with PHPUnit and there are a few workarounds I came across and
would like to know which one should we go for, or if there is anything
better that can be done.
So, while the writer of PHPUnit specifies how to mock static methods
here[0], its only possible if the static calls are to the same class.
For example, for testing FormDisplay::_validate, I need to mock
PMA_config_validate. After I convert validate.lib.php to a class, say,
PMA_Validator, I will have to mock PMA_Validator::config_validate, but the
above solution won't work here (since PMA_Validator cannot be mocked). A
workaround for this could be to pass the mocked static class as mentioned in
[0] to the FormDisplay.class.php and make all static calls via that class.
For this, we could have something of this sort in the constructor of
FormDisplay:
if (defined('TESTSUITE'))
$this->validator = $GLOBALS['dummyValidator'] or $this->validator =
<mockedClassPassedInTheArgument>
else
$this->validator = 'PMA_Validator'
and the calls can be made like:
$caller = $this->validator; // $this->validator::config_validate won't
work
$caller:config_validate();
Another solution could be what is mentioned in a blog here[1]. The
problem with this solution is that the file, FormDisplay.class.php would
include and hence declare the PMA_Validator class before our test suite
tries to (re)declare it by extending MockProxy class.
In either case, it looks like some sort of modification would be needed
to test these classes.
Please advice.
[0]
http://sebastian-bergmann.de/archives/883-Stubbing-and-Mocking-Static-Metho…
[1]
http://www.deanspot.org/content/mocking-static-method-calls-phpunit
As Sebastian Bergmann says, "static methods are death to testability".
This makes me wonder what disadvantages we would have if we make the
methods of PMA_Validator class non-static and use instantiated object of
PMA_Validator class to do the validations?
Hi all,
Any objection to this, otherwise Ayush can go ahead with this approach?