PHPDBUnit - Testing DB interaction with PHPUnit

It's been a while since I have put anything in the heavily neglected little site of mine so I thought I would start posting some updates on a few little projects I have been working on. I have been spending a considerable amount of time traveling for work so I am not quite as far along in these projects as I would like to be, but I have been making some major head way.

The project I would like to talk about right now is a port of Java's DBUnit for php that will compliment the PHPUnit test suite. For those of you not familiar with DBUnit, it is a framework that allows you to easily and quickly test php code that modifies and works with database data. The whole idea behind unit testing is testing functions using well defined input and then comparing the output of that function with the values that you expect the function to produce. With database code this is somewhat difficult because you have to ensure that your database is in a known state prior to running your tests. Currenty, in order to do this properly you would find yourself adding significant amounts of code to your test to simply enter data into your database and then you will add even more code to compare the resulting database values with what your expected output. Ending up with something like this:

This is a fairly simple example and they really only get more complicated from this point forward. In order to the equivelant test using PHPDBUnit you would create a test class as follows:

You will also have to provide two xml files for the above code. This first xml file (dataset.xml) is used to seed the database before every test. The second xml file (expected.xml) is used to compare your database after the test is ran. These two files allow to get the code seeding your database out of your test cases and into their own xml files. There are also other options for generating data sets, I will discuss these options as well as the xml formats for datasets in a future post.

The database connection functionality is built overtop of PDO and support is planned for all standard pdo drivers. The big question mark for me right now is the ODBC driver. The PDO connection is wrapped by a PHPDBUnit_Database class that provides the functionality to generate datasets from the database to test your data and ensure it is correct.

The seeding is controlled by two functions that I did not choose to override in my example: getSetUpOperation() and getTearDownOperation(). These functions simply return a database 'operation' that is to be performed on the database connection using the data set returned by getDataSet. The default setUp operation is a clean insert. This is a truncate operation immediately followed by an insert of all data in the dataset. The default tear down operation is a null operation. You have several built-in possibilities for these operations such as Truncate, refresh, and update. You can also create your own operations if necesary.

My plan is to keep the interface of PHPDBUnit as close as possible to DBUnit while maintaining a more phpish way of doing things. I am planning on the first beta release of PHPDBUnit in July. Of course I welcome feedback on any features you would like to see. In the coming days and weeks I will continue to post more information and examples of how to use DBUnit in your tests.