Carl Vuorinen has a recent post to his site showing you how to unit test your Zend Framework (v1) controllers with the help of database fixtures to provide the test with valid data.

So I started thinking that there must be a way to use fixtures for the database the same way as when testing models with PHPUnit Database extension (PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_TestCase). But since PHP does not have multiple inheritance, we can’t extend both Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase and PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_TestCase. So I started out to create a controller test case class that has support for fixtures the same way as the database test case. I mean, how hard can it be?

He dug into the code for the extension and finally came up with a working solution - an abstract class with "_setup" and "_setupDatabase" methods that create what you'll need to perform your tests. A sample test is included in the post to show you it in action.