Best practices to test protected methods with PHPUnit

Question

I found the discussion on Do you test private method informative.

I have decided, that in some classes, I want to have protected methods, but test them. Some of thes

Answer 1

I'm going to throw my hat into the ring here:

I've used the __call hack with mixed degrees of success. The alternative I came up with was to use the Visitor pattern:

1: generate a stdClass or custom class (to enforce type)

2: prime that with the required method and arguments

3: ensure that your SUT has an acceptVisitor method which will execute the method with the arguments specified in the visiting class

4: inject it into the class you wish to test

5: SUT injects the result of operation into the visitor

6: apply your test conditions to the Visitor's result attribute

Answer 2

You seem to be aware already, but I'll just restate it anyway; It's a bad sign, if you need to test protected methods. The aim of a unit test, is to test the interface of a class, and protected methods are implementation details. That said, there are cases where it makes sense. If you use inheritance, you can see a superclass as providing an interface for the subclass. So here, you would have to test the protected method (But never a private one). The solution to this, is to create a subclass for testing purpose, and use this to expose the methods. Eg.:

class Foo {
  protected function stuff() {
    // secret stuff, you want to test
  }
}

class SubFoo extends Foo {
  public function exposedStuff() {
    return $this->stuff();
  }
}

Note that you can always replace inheritance with composition. When testing code, it's usually a lot easier to deal with code that uses this pattern, so you may want to consider that option.