How to get view data during unit testing in Laravel

Question

I would like to check the array given to a view in a controller function has certain key value pairs. How do I do this using phpunit testing?

//my controller I am testing


public function getEdit ($user_id)
{
    $this->data['user'] = $user = \Models\User::find($user_id);

    $this->data['page_title'] = "Users | Edit";

    $this->data['clients'] = $user->account()->firstOrFail()->clients()->lists('name', 'id');

    $this->layout->with($this->data);

    $this->layout->content = \View::make('user/edit', $this->data);
}

//my test
public function testPostEdit (){

    $user = Models\User::find(parent::ACCOUNT_1_USER_1);

    $this->be($user);

    $response = $this->call('GET', 'user/edit/'.parent::ACCOUNT_1_USER_1);   

    //clients is an array.  I want to get this 
    //array and use $this->assetArrayContains() or something
    $this->assertViewHas('clients');

    $this->assertViewHas('content');

}

Answer 1

TL;DR; Try $data = $response->getOriginalContent()->getData();

---

I found a better way to do it. I wrote a function in the TestCase which returns the array I want from the view data.

protected function getResponseData($response, $key){

    $content = $response->getOriginalContent();

    $data = $content->getData();

    return $data[$key]->all();

}

So to get a value from the $data object I simply use $user = $this->getResponseData($response, 'user');