“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” William S. Burroughs
We already announced AspectMock, the mocking framework that may dramatically change the way you do testing in PHP. In this video this Jeffrey Way shows how AspectMock is different from others. In this post we will demonstrate its powers too, and we will try to break some stereotypes about PHP testing.
To get the code tested, you should always keep in mind how you would write a test for it. We know unit testing requires some good practices to follow and bad practices to avoid.
For example, you should not use singletons. They are bad. Why? Code that use singletons can't be tested.
But what if we could mock singletons:
<?php
function testSingleton()
{
$class = MySingleton::getInstance();
$this->assertInstanceOf('MySingleton', $class);
test::double('MySingleton', ['getInstance' => new DOMDocument]);
$this->assertInstanceOf('DOMDocument', $class);
}
?>
And with AspectMock we really do it - the test is passing. Then should we still consider a singleton to be a bad practice?
Beyond Good and Evil
Classes and methods in PHP are declared statically and can't be changed in runtime. This can be treated as language limitation. Dependency Injection pattern can be used as a workaround for this limitation and widely used for testing. AspectMock breaks the limitation. The same can probably be achieved with Runkit extension. But AspectMock doesn't require you to install additional extensions, and uses only PHP methods to do its job.
"Testability" should not be used as argument deciding what design pattern is right to use and what is not. When you develop with PHP you should always rely on common sense only. Production code should be efficient, fast, readable, and maintainable. The tests should not introduce redundant abstractions to the production code.
Real World Experience With Yii2
Let's get hands on AspectMock. We will use a demo application from the upcoming Yii2 framework.
Despite having dependency injection container, Yii2 does not use it for models. It relies on static calls to global Yii class.
Take a look into LoginForm model of advanced application from the Yii2 repo.
Here is the source code:
<?php
namespace common\models;
use Yii;
use yii\base\Model;
class LoginForm extends Model
{
public $username;
public $password;
public $rememberMe = true;
public function rules()
{
return array(
// username and password are both required
array('username, password', 'required'),
// password is validated by validatePassword()
array('password', 'validatePassword'),
// rememberMe must be a boolean value
array('rememberMe', 'boolean'),
);
}
public function validatePassword()
{
$user = User::findByUsername($this->username);
if (!$user || !$user->validatePassword($this->password)) {
$this->addError('password', 'Incorrect username or password.');
}
}
public function login()
{
if ($this->validate()) {
$user = User::findByUsername($this->username);
Yii::$app->user->login($user, $this->rememberMe ? 3600*24*30 : 0);
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
}
}
?>
As you see, it can't be tested in classical unit testing. The only option we have here is to write an integration test for this class. But with AspectMock we can easily get this class tested with 100% code coverage.
Let's test successful and unsuccessful login scenarios in LoginForm.
LoginForm relies on User class. That's why to write a test, we will mock some of its methods.
We will create a mock with test::double call. In a second argument we are passing the methods that are goint to be replaced and the values they should return.
<?php
public function setUp()
{
test::double('common\models\User', [
'findByUsername' => new User,
'getId' => 1,
]);
}
?>
With this User::findByUsername() will always return an empty User instance.
And user id will always be 1. For user to log in we need that $user->validatePassword() returned true.
We will mock that call in a test.
<?php
public function testCanLoginWhenValid()
{
$user = test::double('common\models\User', ['validatePassword' => true]);
$model = new LoginForm();
$model->username = 'davert';
$model->password = '123456';
$this->assertTrue($model->login());
$user->verifyInvoked('findByUsername',['davert']);
$user->verifyInvoked('validatePassword',['123456']);
}
?>
Additionally we did a check that validatePassword method was called, and user was found by findByUsername call.
In production environment, this methods would use the database.
The same way we can check that user can't log in with invalid password:
<?php
public function testCantLoginWhenInvalid()
{
$user = test::double('common\models\User', ['validatePassword' => false]);
$model = new LoginForm();
$model->username = 'davert';
$model->password = '123456';
$this->assertFalse($model->login());
$user->verifyInvoked('findByUsername',['davert']);
$user->verifyInvoked('validatePassword',['123456']);
}
?>
And in the end we will also check that user can't be logged in without a password.
<?php
public function testCantLoginWithoutPassword()
{
test::double('common\models\User', ['validatePassword' => true]);
$model = new LoginForm();
$model->username = 'davert';
$this->assertFalse($model->login());
$model->password = '123456';
$this->assertTrue($model->login());
}
?>
If we execute this tests with Codeception we will see all them pass successfully:
If you want to see this with your own eyes, clone this application from Github and run Codeception tests:
php vendor/bin/codecept run
Pay attention to tests/_bootstrap.php file where AspectMock Kernel is initialized. Yii autoloader was loaded through AspectKernel as well.
That is important to point AspectMock to a custom autoloader if you do not rely on Composer's autoloader entirely.
How it Works
There are no magical meadows and mighty unicorns in a hat. Still AspectMock uses something really powerful to break the rules. You may have heard of Aspect Oriented Programming. Go AOP framework, developed by @lisachenko does awesome job to bring the AOP to PHP world. It intercepts all method calls and allows to put your own advices for them. The AspectMock is just an advice on top of Go Aop.
Go Aop scnans all libraries and enhances include and require statements with PHP filters.
Go adds a parent proxy class to any loaded PHP class on the fly. So If we get back to Yii2 example, User::findByUsername call will invoke that method on a proxy class.
Conclusions
AspectMock still considered to be an experimental project. But it has a wide potential. It is very simple and easy to use. It has very tiny api easy to remember and understand. That's why tests developed with AspectMock are very clean and readable.
AspectMock is not a testing tool for the bad code. The good code is efficient code. WordPress is much popular then any PHP framework, because of its efficiency. Magento does not have unit tests (only integration), but is the most popular ecommerce platform. We can't say how many there are unit tests in Facebook, but we can bet, it started without unit tests. Code should do its job. Code should be readable and maintanable. Overusing dependency injection does not make the code more efficient in any sense. By the way, in Ruby dependency injection is not widely used, but as you may know ruby developers are very passionate about testing.
AspectMock is not a tool for newbies who just didn't manage to learn the good practices. It is advanced tool, that require you to set dependencies explicitly in a test. That may require deep knowledge on internals of framework you use.
You can try it on your own project. If you have code parts that can't be unit tested in classical manner, then AspectMock can do a job for you.