Michelangelo van Dam has shared something new he learned at the recent ZendCon conference about using fixtures with his PHPUnit testing.

In my previous post I already mentioned Sebastian Jerzy Wilczyński (@dj_sebastian_w) and his uncon session "Unit Testing for Databases using fixtures and phpunit". It made me wonder how much difference it would make if you use fixtures instead of testing database interactions using predefined sets of data. Since I work a lot with Zend Framework I was looking at how I could use fixtures and mock objects to follow Sebastian's guidelines. So I gave it a try. This is what I came up with.

He illustrates with some example code - a set of database data (the fixtures) and sample tests that use the Zend Framework's mapper and table gateway functionality to work with the tables. His test then mocks out the DbTable class for the "Order" object and forces a return of the database fixture data.