Practices for database testing in Symfony2? How to isolate?

Question

What are the current best practices for testing database interaction with Symfony2? I have a simple CRUD setup and i want to make sure my testing is OK. Right now, i have 4 test

Answer 1

I think it's best to always start clean to be sure that tests are fully isolated. To do that I'm simply building the database structure before each test and than I'm filling it with fixtures needed for a given test.

Note that I'm only building needed database tables and I'm only inserting needed fixtures. It's a bit faster than loading a big database dump. It's also more clean as tests don't share fixtures (which makes them easier to maintain).

I have a base test case class called KernelAwareTest which helps me in building the schema. You can find it on gist: https://gist.github.com/1319290

setUp() boots the Symfony kernel and stores a reference to it in a class property (together with references to the DIC and the entity manager). Also a call to generateSchema() is made to generate the database schema (it uses Schema Tool from Doctrine).

By default it generates the database structure for all entities known to the entity manager. You can change this behaviour in your test class by overriding the getMetadatas() method.

P.S.: I tried using in memory database (sqlite) but it wasn't perfect. Anyway it's probably better to run tests against the database you use on production.