CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpunit-testingsoapweb-servicesphpunit
powtac
powtac

Reputation: 41080

How to test Webservices with PHPUnit?

I neet to test a couple of SOAP webservices. What types of tests can I run?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 7928

Answers (3)

powtac
powtac

Reputation: 41080

I found http://www.versioneye.com/package/fakeweb it is

FakeWeb is a helper for faking web requests in Ruby. It works at a global level, without modifying code or writing extensive stubs.

Upvotes: 0

Thomas Ploch
Thomas Ploch

Reputation: 805

It is by far better to test the local consumer classes with mocks of the SoapClient that return pre-recorded result XML, since Unit-Tests are meant to run fast and be independant from remote services.

  • Create a Mock class of your Client class (you should have an object wrapper for the SoapClient to be able to test it thoroughly)
  • Use $this->returnValue() to return pre-recorded XML responses or headers that your system expects

See: http://www.phpunit.de/manual/current/en/test-doubles.html

If your system is dependant on the availability of those remote services, you could implement a watchdog service that checks if the ressource is available, but this is not something that should be done in the Unit-Tests themselves.

Kind regards, Thomas

Upvotes: 8

Pascal MARTIN
Pascal MARTIN

Reputation: 401182

Testing a SOAP web-service will be quite the same than testing a "local" method : you'll have to call that method, passing it some parameters, and chechink the return value, to verify that it corresponds to the parameters you gave.

Of course, with web-services, the call will be a bit more complicated, as you'll have to work with SoapClient to call the method, but the idea will still be the same.

The biggest problems I see are :

  • Web services calls are slow (they go though a network), which means your tests will take time to execute -- which means you won't be able to execute them as often
  • With a webservice, you potentially have more than one possible reason for failure ; which means you'll have more troubles finding out why a test failed :
    • It can fail because there is a bug -- that's the ideal case
    • But it can also fail because the remote server is down
    • Or because the network is down
    • And probably quite some other possile reasons
  • Of course, as the code will be executed on a remote server, and not on the machine that runs PHPUnit, it'll be much harder to get code-coverage (for instance)

Upvotes: 0

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