Robert Basic has a new post to his site with some advice for the Behat users out there testing their Symfony applications. He shows how to easily load up fixture data with the help of Doctrine.

Performing end to end testing of any application requires from us to have a set of reliable test data in the database.

If we write a Symfony application and use Behat to do the end to end testing, the we can use the Doctrine fixtures bundle to create the required fixture loaders and load them in our Behat scenarios when required.

He walks you through the installation of the Doctrine fixtures bundle (via Composer, naturally) and how to enable it via the Symfony kernel configuration. He then includes an example of the fixture loader class from the FOSUserBundle and how it works. Next up is the installation of the Behat Symfony 2 extension and a bit of extra code to make a new feature context for Behat containing a "loadDataFixtures" method to do the heavy lifting.