In this new post to his blog today Federico Cargnelutti shows you how to use mock objects to unit test controllers in your Zend Framework application.

In this post I'll demonstrate a unit test technique for testing Zend Framework Action Controllers using Mock Objects. Unit testing controllers independently has a number of advantages: you can develop controllers test-first (TDD), develop and test all of your controller code before developing any of the view scripts and helps you quickly identify problems in the controller, rather than problems in one of the combination of Model, View and Controller.

He sets up a sample user controller and a test case to go along with it. Drop in a test for the user controller class that uses a "getMock" method to define a mock controller object for the "render" method. He also points out a few issues with this sort of testing in the Zend Framework - the return value of the Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase, issues throwing exceptions with the Front Controller and a problem with the dispatcher's storage of the Action Controller.