PHP Testing

When I was first creating the Database Extension for PHPUnit I realized that there was a very high likelihood that several people would have tests that were already written that they would like to add additional database tests too. To accomplish this I actually wrote the PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_DefaultTester class. In fact, if you were to look at the source of the database test case you will see that all of it's operations are actually forwarded to this class which does all of the work.

Please continue reading to see how you can use composition to add database tests to your existing test cases.

I have completed the initial feature set for the Database extension to PHPUnit. This is a essentially a port of DBUnit to PHP.

For those that may not have read any of my previous postings on the subject the goal of this software is to extend the functionality of PHPUnit to allow using seed data to put a given database into a known state prior to executing each test. It also provides an easy mechanism to compare database contents with an expected dataset.

The database extension has recently been merged into the PHPUnit 3.2 branch and is scheduled to be released in that version. Sebastian Bergmann will be introducing the extension in his Advanced Testing with PHPUnit talk at PHP|Works 2007 in Atlanta September 13 - 14. If you would like to tinker around with the database extension prior to it's release you can always download the latest copy of PHPUnit 3.2 from svn: svn://svn.phpunit.de/phpunit/phpunit/branches/3.2. The source can also be browsed at http://www.phpunit.de/browser/phpunit/branches/3.2/PHPUnit/Extensions/Database.

Please continue reading for an example of how you can now use PHPUnit to even more effectively test data-centric applications.