PHPUnit Database Testing

Question

I am using PHPUnit to test insertion of objects via my storage object. Each domain object has a added and lastmodified timestamp, that is handled by the storage object automatically. I can using PHPUnits DB extensions method assertDataSetsEqual and passing as XML data set as below shows. The problem is added and lastmodified cannot be hardcoded into the XML dataset as this will change all the time automatically, can I tell PHPUnit to ignore these cols? or compare the tables output another way (not XML) where I can ignore these columns?

Test

$user = new Social_User();
$user->setFk_mswuserId(10);
$user->setFirstName('Gavin');

$store = new Storage();
$store->save($user);

$xml_dataset = $this->createFlatXMLDataSet('after-new.xml');
$this->assertDataSetsEqual($xml_dataset, $this->getConnection()->createDataSet());

XML Dataset

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<dataset>
            <user id="1" password="NULL" ip="0" added="0" authenticated="0" lat="0" lon="0" avatar="0" fk_mswuserId="1" timezoneoffset="0" firstName="Ben" lastName="Freeston" deleted="0" lastModified="0" />
            <user id="2" password="NULL" ip="0" added="0" authenticated="0" lat="0" lon="0" avatar="0" fk_mswuserId="10" timezoneoffset="0" firstName="Gavin" lastName="Cooper" deleted="0" lastModified="0"/>
</dataset>

Answer 1

According to

• http://www.phpunit.de/ticket/492

this is already built-in.

Also see these slides by M.Lively (the main DBUnit author)

• http://www.slideshare.net/mjlivelyjr/advanced-phpunit-testing

and B. Eberlei's Ultimate Guide to DB Testing with PHPUnit

• http://www.phpunit.de/manual/dbunit.txt

So it should work along the lines of

$database_dataset = new PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_DataSet_DataSetFilter ( 
    $this->getConnection()->createDataSet(array('bank_account')), 
    array('bank_account' => array ('date_created')) // excluded
);