Setting $_POST for filter_input_array(INPUT_POST) in phpunit test

Question

Having some issues using PHPUnit to test my controllers.

Code I was working on so far was implementing $_POST or other request variables:

$_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'POST';
$_POST = array(
    'test' => true
);

Most of tests worked perfectly this way until I run into methods that take uses of filter_input_array function:

$_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'POST';
$_REQUEST = $_POST = $GLOBALS['_POST'] = array(
    'test' => true
);

// ....

var_dump(filter_input_array(INPUT_POST));

NULL

I'm not willing to remove filter_input functions from not mine code, but I'm unable to make them working in tests.

Versionings:
PHP 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.9 (cli) (built: Apr 17 2015 11:44:57)
Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)
PHPUnit 4.6.6 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

Any help will be appreciated.

EDIT 2015.05.11

Setting $_SERVER with CONTENT_LENGTH and CONTENT_TYPE does not fix the problem. My version of PHP does not allow me to write to php://stdin in way its described in PHP 5.6.0 chagelog (or way I understand it), but file_put_contents(STDIN,..) succeed but does not work anyway.

Because it is a phpunit test, maybe there is some kind of annotation or phpunit.xml entry I don't know yet, that may fix this problem in php-cgi POST setting manner.

Answer 1

If the input to filter_input_array can only be set by the initial request, and not changed at run time, then the only way to still test it is to have a your base test proxy to another test script by making an HTTP request with the right POST data and processing the response.

main_test.php:

<?php
$data = array(
    'testname' => 'yourtestname',
    'some_post_var' => 'some_value'
);

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://localhost/proxy_test.php");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

if ($response == 'pass') {
  // test passed
}

proxy_test.php

<?php
$test_name $_POST['testname']; // what test to run?
$response = run_test($test_name); // run test that uses filter_input_array
if ($response) {
    echo "pass"; // used by main_test.php to check if test passed
} else {
   echo "fail";
}

Answer 2

It seems like this is a limitation of PHP, filter_input_array() does not allow a $_POST array modified at runtime. See this bug for some more information. The workaround is probably to use one of the other filter functions and pass in the $_POST array yourself.