HABTM Unit Testing in CakePHP

I use this blog quite a bit for documenting little quirks, bugs, work-arounds, neat things, and tutorials so that I know where I can find the solution in the future. At the same time, you benefit by hopefully not having to go through some of the same messes I did just to get to this point.

I love CakePHP so far (but still quite the noob), but my biggest gripe is the documentation. The basics are there, but there’s often too little documentation to get the novice going. From the Bakery docs, it’s not exactly clear how to perform tests on models when HABTM (has and belongs to many) relationships are involved. Have no fear, it’s doable (though not straightforward).

Hopefully you baked your MVC pieces and included test scripts to go along with them. If not, do that first. The key part to getting the tests for models that have HABTM relationships is to set-up a fixture representing the table that stores the relationship. Don’t actually set-up the test – just the fixture.

Framework Mania: CakePHP

It has been an interesting month – at the same time I’m picking up CakePHP, I have a client project that uses the Zend Framework. Right out of the gates I like CakePHP better. ZF doesn’t seem quite as cohesive as Cake, so getting it set-up has been more challenging. Granted, the client’s setup is a little more complex than the standard setup, but it still seems like there’s a lot more work involved just to get things going – lots more configuration. After two days on Zend I already realize how spoiled I am with Cake.

With Cake, I’m finally starting to learn unit testing. It seems real simple in theory, and I’m sure it is once you get the hang of it, but it is tedious. I’m talking about the amount of actual work involved just getting these test cases working. My simple pleasure at the end of the day is watching the screen fill up with a bunch of green “Pass” statements… no red.