Symfony2: Testing entity validation constraints

Question

Does anyone have a good way to unit test an entity\'s validation constraints in Symfony2?

Ideally I want to have access to the Dependency Injection Container within

Answer 1

We end up rolling your own base test case to access the dependency container from within a test case. Here the class in question:

boot();

        self::$container = self::$kernel->getContainer();
    }

    public function get($serviceId)
    {
        return self::$kernel->getContainer()->get($serviceId);
    }
}

With this base class, you can now do this in your test methods to access the validator service:

$validator = $this->get('validator');

We decided to go with a static function instead of the class constructor but you could easily change the behavior to instantiate the kernel into the constructor directly instead of relying on the static method setUpBeforeClass provided by PHPUnit.

Also, keep in mind that each single test method in you test case won't be isolated fro, each others because the container is shared for the whole test case. Making modification to the container may have impact on you other test method but this should not be the case if you access only the validator service. However, this way, the test cases will run faster because you will not need to instantiate and boot a new kernel for each test methods.

For the sake of reference, we find inspiration for this class from this blog post. It is written in French but I prefer to give credit to whom it belongs :)

Regards,
Matt