Question

How do you prevent a CakePHP 2.0 test case, which extends CakeTestCase (uses PHPUnit), from reloading fixtures between tests?

Background: There is a set of integration tests which we have written with CakePHP 2.0 using PHPUnit. We have extended the test case class from the standard CakeTestCase. For this set of tests, we have a bunch of fixtures setup to populate the data from the database. Naturally, these tests take a long time to run. Basically, all of the time is coming from Cake unloading and re-loading all of the fixtures between tests.

All of the tests act as READ only. We are just issuing find calls to the database and testing the logic among a set of class interactions based on those results. In fact, the tests can be boiled down to:

class ALongRunningTest extends CakeTestCase {
    public $fixtures = array('app.class1', 'app.class2', ... 'app.class8');

    /**
     * @dataProvider provider
     * @test
     */
    public function checkCompositionLogic($val1, $val2, $val3) {
        // internally calls class1 and class3
        $data = $this->ModelX->generateComplexStructure($val1);

        // internally calls other classes & models, which touch the
        // other loaded fixtures
        $results = $this->ModelY->checkAllWhichApply($val2, $data);

        $this->assertEquals($val3, $results);
    }

    public function provider() {
        return array(
            array(stuff, stuff1, stuff2),
            array(x_stuff, x_stuff1, x_stuff2),
            array(y_stuff, y_stuff1, y_stuff2),
            array(z_stuff, z_stuff1, z_stuff2),
            array(a_stuff, a_stuff1, a_stuff2),
            // More test cases
        );
    }
}

I’ve not been able to find anything on how to prevent this. I saw in the CakeTestCase class a public variable autoFixtures with a comment that says if you change it to false it won’t load the fixtures. It makes a note stating that you have to load them manually. However, I see no documentation on how to actually load them manually.

Answer 1

Strictly speaking, CakePHP is correct in the way that it works. Tests shouldn’t be dependent upon each other, so that database is reset between each test case. You could even argue that it should be reset between each test method, but the overhead would be even more noticeable.

However, since you’re doing read only actions on the database, you could remove all the references to fixtures in your test cases and set up your database entries before you run the test suite (e.g. import it from an SQL file).

Or you could create a custom test suite that adds a whole load of data, e.g:

class AllTest extends CakeTestSuite {
    public static function suite() {
        self::loadDB();
        $suite = new CakeTestSuite('All tests');
        $suite->addTestDirectoryRecursive(TESTS . 'Case');
        return $suite;
    }
    public static function loadDB() {
         //Do some set up here using your models
    }
}

The advantage of doing it that was is that if you ever had to introduce tests that do write to the database, you could run them under a separate test suite.