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Test Strategy

I normally try and write Unit and either Integration or Feature tests. But at times this doesn't make much sense, for example for the AccessibleFixtures repository.

The \App\Http\Controllers\Api\V1\FixturesController is basically a proxy for AccessibleFixtures and therefore the extensive integration tests written for the /api/v1/fixtures endpoint are quite enough and act as a de-facto integration test for the repository. This is why there is no integration test for it.

This is not the case for other repositories, for example AccessibleSeasons, Accessible Competitions and AccessibleDivisions. This was on purpose and done for completeness.

Test data with Factories and Builders

A very common practice for creating test data is to use the excellent fzaninotto/faker package, and the factory() method it provides. I believe it comes as default with Laravel.

I have been using it for years in every Laravel (or Lumen) project I worked on and this project is no exception. However, here I have also used a different technique, a sort of wrapper around the factories, to make it more fluent and readable: Builders.

Compare the following way to create a club and a team using factories:

$club = factory(\App\Models\Club::class)->create([
  'name' => 'Arsenal Club',
]);

$team = factory(\App\Models\Team::clas)->create([
  'name'    => 'The Gunners Man',
  'club_id' => $club->id,
]);

and using builders:

$club = aClub()->named('Arsenal Club')->build();

$team = aTeam()->named('The Gunners Man')->inClub($club)->build();

Much more readable and easier to understand. It also hides the details of how the model is structured. For example, if the name of a club is not stored in the name field any more, we will need only to change the builder, rather than all the occurences where the factory has been used.

The downside of using these builders is that I have to declare global functions to access them: see helpers.php.

To avoid this I took another approach: a Test Model Factory. This is a final class that provides static methods to access the builder, so I can now write code like

$role = \Tests\Builders\TestModelFactory::aRole()->named('Marketing Officer')->build();