Unit Testing with items that need to send headers

Question

I\'m currently working with PHPUnit to try and develop tests alongside what I\'m writing, however, I\'m currently working on writing the Session Manager, and am having issue

Answer 1

As I'm unittesting my bootstrap right now (yes I know most of you don't do that), I'm running in to the same problem (both header() and session_start()). The solution I found is rather simple, in your unittest bootstrap define a constant and simply check it before sending the header or starting the session:

// phpunit_bootstrap.php
define('UNITTEST_RUNNING', true);

// bootstrap.php (application bootstrap)
defined('UNITTEST_RUNNING') || define('UNITTEST_RUNNING', false);
.....
if(UNITTEST_RUNNING===false){
    session_start();
}

I agree that this is not perfect by design, but I'm unittesting an existing application, rewriting large parts is not desired. I also using the same logic to test private methods using the __call() and __set() magic methods.

public function __set($name, $value){
    if(UNITTEST_RUNNING===true){
       $name='_' . $name;
       $this->$name=$value;
    }
    throw new Exception('__set() can only be used when unittesting!');
 }