DevShed has concluded their series on ActiveRecord today with This new post, the end of the chapter from php|architect's Guide to Design Patterns.

This article, the second of two parts, helps you use design patterns to better organize how your web application interacts with a database. It is excerpted from chapter 14 of the book php|architect's Guide to PHP Design Patterns, written by Jason E. Sweat.

Databases usually just work, but failure is not unheard of. To make sure your code operates correctly under failure conditions, let's simulate a failure using a Mock Object, which stands in for the connection object.

They create the mock object and use it to test the ActiceRecord instance, including (as before) the unit testing code as well. They finish it off with examples of how to search for records and update the records that already exist.