In many of our projects, utilities and vendor classes are implemented with a singleton pattern. [...] In this post, we'll cover a nice way to inject a PHPUnit mock object for use in testing methods that utilize singleton classes.

He starts by introducing mocking and how to use mock classes in PHPUnit with a simple "sayHello" example. Adding on another layer, he creates a "SomeclassMock" class, defining its own "expects" and "cleanup" methods. This class forces the Singleton method to act more like a regular non-static method and "resets" it after each use.

Making CakePHP's pagination work together with Mariano Iglesias' expect functionality seems to be impossible. The expect()'ed associations are only used in the paginator's findCount() call, but not in the findAll() call which actually retrieves the results. Come on join me and find out how to fix this.

His solution involves the creation of a custom pagination method that ends up calling the Paginator helper with some special parameters (replacing the non-cooperative defaults).