Question

I have a unit tests for Zend Framework controllers extending Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase.

The tests are dispatching an action, which forwards to another action, like this:

// AdminControllerTest.php

public testAdminAction()    
   $this->dispath('/admin/index/index');
   // forwards to login page
   $this->assertModule('user');
   $this->assertController('profile');
   $this->assertController('login');
   $this->assertResponseCode(401);
}

// NewsControllerTest.php

public testIndexAction()
{
     $this->dispatch('/news/index/index');
     $this->assertModule('news');
     $this->assertController('index');
     $this->assertController('index');
     $this->assertResponseCode(200);

}

Both of the tests are passing when they are run as a seperate tests.
When I run them in the same test suite, the second one fails.
Instead dispatching /news/index/index the previous request is dispatched (user module).

How to trace this bug? Looks like I have some global state somewhere in the application, but I’m unable do debug this. How can I dump the objects between the tests in the suite? setUpBefore/AfterClass are static, so there are no so many data about the object instances.

I know this is a kind of guess what question. It’s hard to provide reliable data here, because they would took to much place, so feel free to ask for details.

The whole unit test setup is more or less like described in: Testing Zend Framework MVC Applications – phly, boy, phly or Testing Zend Framework Controllers « Federico Cargnelutti.

Solution:

I’ve determined the issue (after a little nap). The problem was not in unit test setup, but in the tested code.

I use different ACL objects based on module name. Which one to use was determined by static call to action helper, which cached the result in a private static variable to speed things up. This cache was executed only when run in a test suite. I just need more unit tests for this code 🙂

(I’m sorry for such a rubbish post, but I’ve stuck with this for a day and I hoped someone else experienced similar kind of this Heisenbug with unit tests in general)

Answer 1

You may try clearingrequest and response objects before dispatching each action, like this:

$this->resetRequest()
     ->resetResponse()
     ->dispatch('/news/index/index');