Why does my PHPUnit Fixtures Stack test is not working properly?

Question

I've been reading this manual, but I'm not understanding why the $stack loose the values after each test function.

Here's my code:

require_once BASE . 'Transaction.php';

class TransactionTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    protected $stack;

    protected function setUp()
    {
        Database::getInstance()->connect();
        $this->stack = new Transaction(123456789);
    }

    public function testInsert()
    {
        $data['name'] = 'Omega';
        $this->stack->set($data);
        $this->assertTrue($this->stack->save());
    }

    public function testUpdate()
    {
        $object = PHPUnitReflectionClass::getInstance($this->stack);
        $this->assertEquals(array('name' , 'Omega'), $object->getProperty('name'));
    }
}

At the "testUpdate" function, I don't have the name.

If I just copy all the PHPUnit example, all tests will run perfectly, but I'm not able to see the values using var_dump at the next function. And this is another thing that I don't get it.

Answer 1

The problems are:

1. the setup method is called before each test method invocation;
2. your test are depends each other.

For the first problem you can use the setUpBeforeClass method. From the doc:

The setUp() and tearDown() template methods are run once for each test method (and on fresh instances) of the test case class.

In addition, the setUpBeforeClass() and tearDownAfterClass() template methods are called before the first test of the test case class is run and after the last test of the test case class is run, respectively.

For the second problem, is a bad practice to have tests that depends each otherbut PHPUnit supports the declaration of explicit dependencies between test methods, so you can use the @depends annotation to express dependencies: if a test fail the other is not executed.

So your test class can be, as example:

require_once BASE . 'Transaction.php';

class TransactionTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    protected static $stack;

     public static function setUpBeforeClass()
    {
        Database::getInstance()->connect();
        $this->stack = new Transaction(123456789);
    }

    public function testInsert()
    {
        $data['name'] = 'Omega';
        $this->stack->set($data);
        $this->assertTrue($this->stack->save());
    }


   /**
    * @depends testInsert
    */
    public function testUpdate()
    {
        $object = PHPUnitReflectionClass::getInstance($this->stack);
        $this->assertEquals(array('name' , 'Omega'), $object->getProperty('name'));
    }
}

Hope this help