In the Preamble to this Manifesto, I set out the basic proposal for direct integration of support for applying Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) to the Zend Framework. The ideal was to move away from line-by-line setup and manipulation of Zend instances towards a more simplified model which is standardised for any PHPSpec specs.

This morning I merged the experimental branch for the implementation of the Zend Framework specific PHPSpec_Context into the main trunk for release in PHPSpec 0.3.0. Documentation of the Zend Context will be completed within the next day or two and added to the growing PHPSpec Manual at http://dev.phpspec.org/manual now available.

The main customisation required to get the Zend Context operational is to set up elements of the FrontController, I’ve selected two primary methods. The first is to use several static methods on PHPSpec_Context_Zend (addControllerDirectory() and addModuleDirectory()) and a more flexible addFrontControllerSetupCallback() which will accept a custom function or static method reference to execute. The former is handy since you can easily organise your bootstrap file into a static class and segregate FrontController, Dispatcher, Action Helper, etc. elements you are using to customise how the Zend Framework operates. Both can be called from any file included into a Context file (e.g. SpecHelper.php).

Here’s a really simple example of a Zend Framework spec. I’ll post a more in-depth tutorial next week once the Manual is finalised, and some final cleanups applied (e.g. allowing for Router specification). The only priority for basic operations left is an implementation of a Zend_Factory class to allow you to replace objects directly instantiated within controllers (to maintain the golden standard of specifying/testing controllers isolated from it’s dependencies). We’ll really start kicking some ZF ass when PHPMock has an initial devel release!

[geshi lang=php]PHPSpec_Context_Zend::addControllerDirectory(‘../src/application/controllers’);

class DescribeTwitterController extends PHPSpec_Context_Zend
{

public function itShouldDisplayHomeTweetsFromDefaultRetrieveAction()
{
$this->get(‘retrieve’);
$this->response()->should->haveText(‘Tweets From Twitterers Followed:’);
}

public function itShouldPostTweetOnSendActionUsingPostData()
{
$this->post(‘send’, array(‘message’=>’@padraicb: All your specs are belong to us’));
$this->response()->should->haveText(‘You submitted a new Tweet!’);
}

public function itShouldRetrieveMessagesForUserIdInParamsFromRetrieveAction()
{
$this->get(‘twitter/retrieve/user/padraicb’);
$this->response()->should->beSuccess();
}
}[/geshi]

It’s obvious this is bare minimum. There is still a lot of ground to cover incl. integrating PHPMock, so you can literally mock/stub the Twitter service package being used in the controller action itself (Note to Matthew – implement Zend_Service_Twitter already…;)) and set expectations of how the Controller should use that Twitter service. Adding some basic HTML/XML safe Matchers would also add some fairly substantial help for specifying what the response output should be, or what template any controller action should render.

But the basics, and in short the most time consuming, bit of integration to get something working with the Zend Framework at a level not requiring any devious workarounds is now complete. The weekend should see some really useful additions to this base. Your comments are most welcome as usual whether here, or on the mailing list.

Related posts:

  1. The PHPSpec Zend Framework App Testing Manifesto: Preamble
  2. PHPSpec Reporting Gets A Needed Boost
  3. The PHPSpec 0.2.0devel API
  4. PHPSpec 0.2.0beta Released
  5. PHPSpec 0.2.0 Released