Symfony2: Testing entity validation constraints

We end up rolling your own base test case to access the dependency container from within a test case. Here the class in question:

<?php

namespace Application\AcmeBundle\Tests;

// This assumes that this class file is located at:
// src/Application/AcmeBundle/Tests/ContainerAwareUnitTestCase.php
// with Symfony 2.0 Standard Edition layout. You may need to change it
// to fit your own file system mapping.
require_once __DIR__.'/../../../../app/AppKernel.php';

class ContainerAwareUnitTestCase extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    protected static $kernel;
    protected static $container;

    public static function setUpBeforeClass()
    {
        self::$kernel = new \AppKernel('dev', true);
        self::$kernel->boot();

        self::$container = self::$kernel->getContainer();
    }

    public function get($serviceId)
    {
        return self::$kernel->getContainer()->get($serviceId);
    }
}

With this base class, you can now do this in your test methods to access the validator service:

$validator = $this->get('validator');

We decided to go with a static function instead of the class constructor but you could easily change the behavior to instantiate the kernel into the constructor directly instead of relying on the static method setUpBeforeClass provided by PHPUnit.

Also, keep in mind that each single test method in you test case won't be isolated fro, each others because the container is shared for the whole test case. Making modification to the container may have impact on you other test method but this should not be the case if you access only the validator service. However, this way, the test cases will run faster because you will not need to instantiate and boot a new kernel for each test methods.

For the sake of reference, we find inspiration for this class from this blog post. It is written in French but I prefer to give credit to whom it belongs :)

Regards,
Matt

Ok since this got two votes I guess other people are interested.

I decided to get my shovel out and was pleasantly surprised (so far anyway) that this wasn't at all difficult to pull off.

I remembered that each Symfony2 component can be used in a stand alone mode and therefore that I could create the validator myself.

Looking at the docs at: https://github.com/symfony/Validator/blob/master/ValidatorFactory.php

I realised that since there was a ValidatorFactory it was trivial to create a validator (especially for validation done by annotations which I am, although if you look at the docblock on the page I linked above you'll also find ways to validate xml and yml).

First:

# Symfony >=2.1
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Validation;
# Symfony <2.1
use Symfony\Component\Validator\ValidatorFactory;

and then:

# Symfony >=2.1
$validator = Validation::createValidatorBuilder()->enableAnnotationMapping()->getValidator();
# Symfony <2.1
$validator = ValidatorFactory::buildDefault()->getValidator();

$errors = $validator->validate($entity);

$this->assertEquals(0, count($errors));

I hope this helps anyone else whose conscience wouldn't allow them to just use WebTestCase ;).