Making fun of CakePHP behavior for unit testing

Question

I just started with unit testing in CakePHP (yay!) And ran into the following problem. Hope someone can help me :-)

Situation

My model uses behavior to send changes to the API after saving locally. I would like to fake all the calls made in the API during the test (those will be checked separately) in order to save the load on the API server and, more importantly, not really save the changes :-)

I am using CakePHP 2.4.1.

What i tried

• Read the docs. The manual shows how to do this for components and helpers, but not for behavior.
• Google What I found:
  • A message from a Google group that says it's simply "impossible." I am not responsible for the answer.
  • An article explaining how to mock an object. Comes pretty close.

The code from the article reads:

$provider = $this->getMock('OurProvider', array('getInfo')); $provider->expects($this->any()) ->method('getInfo') ->will($this->returnValue('200')); 

This may be the wrong direction, but I think this may be a good start.

What I want

Effective: a code snippet to demonstrate how to mock the behavior in the CakePHP model for unit testing purposes.

Perhaps this question will lead to the addition of CakePHP's guide as an added bonus as well, as I feel it is missing there.

Thanks in advance for this!

Update (2013-11-07)

I found this related question that should answer this question (partially). No need to mock the API, instead I can create a behavior test that the model will use.

I'm trying to figure out what this BehaviorTest should look like.

Answer 1

Use class registry

As in many classes, the behavior is added to the class registry using the class name as the key, and for subsequent queries for the same object is loaded from the classifier . Thus, the way to mock behavior is to simply put it in the class registry before using it.

Full example:

 <?php App::uses('AppModel', 'Model'); class Example extends AppModel { } class TestBehavior extends ModelBehavior { public function foo() { throw new \Exception('Real method called'); } } class BehaviorExampleTest extends CakeTestCase { /** * testNormalBehavior * * @expectedException Exception * @expectedExceptionMessage Real method called * @return void */ public function testNormalBehavior() { $model = ClassRegistry::init('Example'); $model->Behaviors->attach('Test'); $this->assertInstanceOf('TestBehavior', $model->Behaviors->Test); $this->assertSame('TestBehavior', get_class($model->Behaviors->Test)); $this->assertSame(['foo' => ['Test', 'foo']], $model->Behaviors->methods()); $model->foo(); } public function testMockedBehavior() { $mockedBehavior = $this->getMock('TestBehavior', ['foo', 'bar']); ClassRegistry::addObject('TestBehavior', $mockedBehavior); $model = ClassRegistry::init('Example'); $model->Behaviors->attach('Test'); $this->assertInstanceOf('TestBehavior', $model->Behaviors->Test); $this->assertNotSame('TestBehavior', get_class($model->Behaviors->Test)); $expected = [ 'foo' => ['Test', 'foo'], 'bar' => ['Test', 'bar'], 'expects' => ['Test', 'expects'], // noise, due to being a mock 'staticExpects' => ['Test', 'staticExpects'], // noise, due to being a mock ]; $this->assertSame($expected, $model->Behaviors->methods()); $model->foo(); // no exception thrown $mockedBehavior ->expects($this->once()) ->method('bar') ->will($this->returnValue('something special')); $return = $model->bar(); $this->assertSame('something special', $return); } }