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Practical PHPUnit: Testing XML generation
Sep 17, 2010 @ 18:51:02

On the Qafoo blog today there's a new post from Tobias Schlitt about a method you can use to unit test methods that generate XML without messing with a lot of extra overhead just to test the results.

Testing classes which generate XML can be a cumbersome work. At least, if you don't know the right tricks to make your life easier. In this article, I will throw some light upon different approaches and show you, how XML generation can be tested quite easily using XPath.

He includes a sample class, qaPersonVisitor, that has methods inside it to create a simple XML documents based on the first and last name data into a DOM element. He sets up the basic test case that creates a simple person - including gender and date of birth - and offer a few different suggestions on handling the check (in PHPUnit tests):

  • the naive way of rebuilding the DOM object and assert that they are equal
  • testing the resulting XML from the DOM object against a pre-generated XML document
  • matching the contents via CSS selectors
  • using the tag matching assertions
  • using XPath in a custom assertion (with short and long uses of it included)
tagged: unittest phpunit xml generation xpath dom

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