How to test Laravel 5 controllers methods

Question

We have Laravel 5 controllers method:

public function getInput()
{
    $input = \Request::all();
    $links = $input['links'];
    $this->startLinks =  explode("\n", $links);
    return $this;
}

How can we test this single method? How to pass POST request with data to this method? And how to create instance of this controller class in my test method?

Answer 1

This looks like a method which probably shouldn't belong in a controller. If you are serious about testing, I'd highly recommend reading up on the repository pattern. When testing, it will make your life a lot easier to have everything abstracted out of the controllers.=

With that said though, this is still very testable. The main idea is to figure out what needs to be tested and ONLY test that. This means we don't care what the dependencies are doing, only that they are doing and returning something which the rest of the method will need. In this case, it's the Request facade.

Then you want to make sure the variables are set appropriately and that the method returned an instance of that class. It actually ends up being pretty straight forward.

Should look something like this...

public function testGetInput()
{
    $requestParams = [
        'links' => "somelink.com\nsomeotherlink.com\nandanotherlink.com\ndoesntmatter.com"
    ];

    // Here we are saying the \Request facade should expect the all method to be called and that all method should
    // return some pre-defined things which we will use in our asserts.
    \Request::shouldReceive('all')->once()->andReturn($requestParams);

    // Here we are just using Laravel's IoC container to instantiate your controller.  Change YourController to whatever
    // your controller is named
    $class = App::make('YourController');

    // Getting results of function so we can test that it has some properties which were supposed to have been set.
    $return = $class->getInput();

    // Again change this to the actual name of your controller.
    $this->assertInstanceOf('YourController', $return);

    // Now test all the things.
    $this->assertTrue(isset($return->startLinks));
    $this->assertTrue(is_array($return->startLinks));
    $this->assertTrue(in_array('somelink.com', $return->startLInks));
    $this->assertTrue(in_array('nsomeotherlink.com', $return->startLInks));
    $this->assertTrue(in_array('nandanotherlink.com', $return->startLInks));
    $this->assertTrue(in_array('ndoesntmatter.com', $return->startLInks));
}

Answer 2

I think you are looking for this.

If your test class extends TestCase you will get a lot of helper methods which will do heavy lifting for you.

function testSomething() {
    // POST request to your controller@action
    $response = $this->action('POST', 'YourController@yourAction', ['links' => 'link1 \n link2']);
    // you can check if response was ok
    $this->assertTrue($response->isOk(), "Custom message if something went wrong");
    // or if view received variable
    $this->assertViewHas('links', ['link1', 'link2']);
}

Codeception extends this functionality even further.