-- Federico Cargnelutti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
(on Monday, 16 June 2008, 12:06 PM +0100):
> I was writing a more high level and user friendly interface to speed up the
> development of modules, when I realized that in the manual you are calling the
> render() method within the action controller. While this might seem a
> reasonable thing to do, I was thinking, how are other developers going to test
> the action controllers? Or how am I going to format and validate the output
> before a view is rendered and echoed to the browser?
render() proxies to a method in the ViewRenderer, which calls the view
object's render() method -- which returns a string. That string is then
stored in the response object. So, there are no problems here.
> So, my question is, should the action controller be responsible for rendering
> and echoing the Views, or is this something that needs to be delegated to a
> different component? For example, I've changed:
>
> $view = new Zend_View;
> $view->render( str filename );
>
> $view = $this->getView( str filename [, module ] );
> return $view;
>
> This allows me to test the each action method against a View object, and also,
> format the output and validate the code using 3rd party libraries, such as
> HTML_Purifier and PHP_CodeSniffer.
You can attach filter objects to Zend_View for doing this... Check out
the documentation for more information on this.
> So, has anyone experienced this before? How are you testing your action
> controllers?
These days, using the new MVC assertions I've been working up. ;-)
http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFPROP/Zend_Controller+Testing+Infrastructure
http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/branches/user/matthew/mvcTesting
Basically, I have a set of assertions that allow you to check the final
response content against a variety of CSS selector or XPath assertions,
as well as check for specific headers, redirects, or response codes.
This method of testing is slightly better than testing the individual
action controllers as it allows you to take into account the entire
request environment -- routing, dispatching, layouts, any plugins you
have, registered helpers, etc.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
Software Architect | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Zend Framework | http://framework.zend.com/
