session_regenerate_id() - headers already sent in unit testing Yii controller

Question

I'm trying to unit-test my controller (Yii framework).

/** 
   * @dataProvider provider
   */
  public function testActionEdit_view_login($controller){
    $user = new CWebUser;
    $user->id = 978;
    $identity = new UserIdentity('me@test.com', '123456');
    $user->login($identity);
    $controller->actionEdit();

    $output = ob_get_contents();
    assertContains('Add/Change Profile Picture:', $output);
    assertContains('bio', $output);
    assertContains('specialties', $output);
    assertContains('change login', $output);
    assertContains('New Password', $output);
  }

When I do

$user->login($identity);

in order to login, I get the following error:

session_regenerate_id(): Cannot regenerate session id - headers already sent

I've already tried buffering the output by putting this at the beginning of the class:

public static function setUpBeforeClass(){
  ob_start();
}

I also put ob_clean() in setUp() and ob_end_clean() in tearDownAfterClass().

Still I get the message that headers have already been sent. There are no spaces or newlines in the file, when I comment out the specific test method, it works perfectly. The login() seems to cause the problem.

Anyone got ideas how to prevent this / maybe unit-test the controller differently?

Thanks, MrB

Answer 1

Got it. I had included some Yii files before the ob_start(), which seem to have printed the headers. Now I buffer that, too.