Chapter 4. Fixtures

setUp() and tearDown() are nicely symmetrical in theory but not in practice. In practice, you only need to implement tearDown() if you have allocated external resources like files or sockets in setUp(). If your setUp() just creates plain PHP objects, you can generally ignore tearDown(). However, if you create many objects in your setUp(), you might want to unset() the variables pointing to those objects in your tearDown() so they can be garbage collected. The garbage collection of test case objects is not predictable.

What happens when you have two tests with slightly different setups? There are two possibilities:

There are few good reasons to share fixtures between tests, but in most cases the need to share a fixture between tests stems from an unresolved design problem.

A good example of a fixture that makes sense to share across several tests is a database connection: you log into the database once and reuse the database connection instead of creating a new connection for each test. This makes your tests run faster.

Example 4.3 uses the setUpBeforeClass() and tearDownAfterClass() template methods to connect to the database before the test case class' first test and to disconnect from the database after the last test of the test case, respectively.

<?php
class DatabaseTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    protected static $dbh;

    public static function setUpBeforeClass()
    {
        self::$dbh = new PDO('sqlite::memory:');
    }

    public static function tearDownAfterClass()
    {
        self::$dbh = NULL;
    }
}
?>

It cannot be emphasized enough that sharing fixtures between tests reduces the value of the tests. The underlying design problem is that objects are not loosely coupled. You will achieve better results solving the underlying design problem and then writing tests using stubs (see Chapter 9), than by creating dependencies between tests at runtime and ignoring the opportunity to improve your design.

It is hard to test code that uses singletons. The same is true for code that uses global variables. Typically, the code you want to test is coupled strongly with a global variable and you cannot control its creation. An additional problem is the fact that one test's change to a global variable might break another test.

In PHP, global variables work like this:

Besides global variables, static attributes of classes are also part of the global state.

By default, PHPUnit runs your tests in a way where changes to global and super-global variables ($GLOBALS, $_ENV, $_POST, $_GET, $_COOKIE, $_SERVER, $_FILES, $_REQUEST) do not affect other tests. Optionally, this isolation can be extended to static attributes of classes.

The @backupGlobals annotation that is discussed in the section called “@backupGlobals” can be used to control the backup and restore operations for global variables. Alternatively, you can provide a blacklist of global variables that are to be excluded from the backup and restore operations like this

class MyTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    protected $backupGlobalsBlacklist = array('globalVariable');

    // ...
}

The @backupStaticAttributes annotation that is discussed in the section called “@backupStaticAttributes” can be used to control the backup and restore operations for static attributes. Alternatively, you can provide a blacklist of static attributes that are to be excluded from the backup and restore operations like this

class MyTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    protected $backupStaticAttributesBlacklist = array(
      'className' => array('attributeName')
    );

    // ...
}