How to test Webservices with PHPUnit?

Question

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

Answer 1

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