How To Create a SilverStripe Test

A unit test class will test the behaviour of one of your DataObjects. This simple fragment of SiteTreeTest provides us the basics of creating unit tests.

<?php
class SiteTreeTest extends SapphireTest {
    
    // Define the fixture file to use for this test class
    static $fixture_file = 'SiteTreeTest.yml';

    /** 
     * Test generation of the URLSegment values.
     *  - Turns things into lowercase-hyphen-format
     *  - Generates from Title by default, unless URLSegment is explicitly set
     *  - Resolves duplicates by appending a number
     */
    public function testURLGeneration() {
        $expectedURLs = array(
            'home' => 'home',
            'staff' => 'my-staff',
            'about' => 'about-us',
            'staffduplicate' => 'my-staff-2',
            'product1' => '1-1-test-product',
            'product2' => 'another-product',
            'product3' => 'another-product-2',
            'product4' => 'another-product-3',
        );
        
        foreach($expectedURLs as $fixture => $urlSegment) {
            $obj = $this->objFromFixture('Page', $fixture);
            $this->assertEquals($urlSegment, $obj->URLSegment);
        }
    }
}

There are a number of points to note in this code fragment:

• Your test is a subclass of SapphireTest. Both unit tests and functional tests are a subclass of SapphireTest.
• static $fixture_file is defined. The testing framework will automatically set up a new database for each of your tests. The initial database content will be sourced from the YML file that you list in $fixture_file. The property can take an array of fixture paths.
• Each method that starts with the word "test" will be executed by the TestRunner. Define as many as you like; the database will be rebuilt for each of these.
• $this->objFromFixture($className, $identifier) can be used to select one of the objects named in your fixture file. To identify to the object, we provide a class name and an identifier. The identifier is specified in the YML file but not saved in the database anywhere. objFromFixture() looks the DataObject up in memory rather than using the database. This means that you can use it to test the functions responsible for looking up content in the database.

Assertion commands

$this->assertEquals() is an example of an assertion function.
These functions form the basis of our tests - a test fails if and only if one or more of the assertions fail.
See the PHPUnit manual for a listing of all PHPUnit's built-in assertions.

The SapphireTest class comes with additional assertions which are more specific to the framework, e.g. assertEmailSentwhich can simulate sending emails through theEmail->send()` API without actually using a mail server (see the testing emails) guide.

Fixtures

Often you need to test your functionality with some existing data, so called "fixtures". These records are inserted on a fresh test database automatically. Read more about fixtures.