Denderello's Blog

sfTesterResponse aka. your new weapon of invalid markup destruction

If you are like me you want to have your markup (html, rss, google sitemap files, etc.) as valid as possible. To achieve this most of us use the w3c validation service or browser add-ons. Testing all your pages this way is hard and error prone. I can also speak from my own experience that after some time you don't keep an eye on your markup because you simply forget about it. Thanks to Kris Wallsmith the new symfony 1.3 version will ship a new method included in sfTesterResponse called isValid() which will test your response for valid markup.

So where to start?

To use this new method you just need to add the method invocation to the response context of your functional tests:

 
<?php
 
// INSIDE YOUR FUNCTIONAL TESTFILE
 
// do some request with the functional test object ...
 
with('response')->begin()->
  // test your response ...
 
  isValid()->
end()
 
?>
 

If everything wents well you will see summary like this one on your terminal:

Basically the sfTesterResponse::isValid() tries to load the response via the DOMDocument class and returns 'response is well-formed "xml"'. So for now you just tested that your markup is valid XML code. That's cool for testing RSS or ATOM markup but it would be a lot cooler to validate your markup against the DTD files that you defined in your DOCTYPE when using HTML markup.

Testing against DTD files

If you want to do so it's as simple as turning on the light switch in your living room. Just pass a boolean true to sfTesterResponse::isValid() and your markup get's tested against the defined DTD files:

 
<?php
 
// INSIDE YOUR FUNCTIONAL TESTFILE
 
// do some request with the functional test object ...
 
with('response')->begin()->
  // test your response ...
 
  isValid(true)->
end()
 
?>
 

If your responses are valid you will see something like the following output.

So, if you pass a boolean true to sfTesterResponse::isValid() your markup get's validated against the defined DTD files. But there is something you need to know about the DTD validation. Since W3C blocks requests that don't come from browsers the symfony developers were forced to manipulate the path of the DTD files to a bundled version of them.

What about XSD and Relax NG validation?

If you have a XSD or Relax NG file available to validate your markup it's easy use to it in your test. If you pass a path as string to sfTesterResponse::isValid() it will this use file to validate your markup against it. This way you can for example test your generated google sitemap files against the XSD file which is shipped by google:

 
<?php
 
// INSIDE YOUR FUNCTIONAL TESTFILE
 
// do some request with the functional test object ...
 
with('response')->begin()->
  // test your response ...
 
  isValid(sfConfig::get('sf_test_dir') . '/data/xsd/google/sitemap.xsd')->
end()
 
?>
 

I dumped the XSD file in the 'test/data/xsd' folder which I created by hand to have all XSD files for my tests in one place. This time sfTesterResponse::isValid() tries to validate the markup against XSD file you defined via the passed parameter. If everything went well you will see the following output.

Sadly I had no chance to test markup against Relax NG files. But it works the same as with XSD files.

Talk about validation errors dude!

The great thing about testing your pages for valid markup is the fact that you can easier track down validation errors because the output of the tests will give you information about the error. Let's take the dynamically generated google sitemap as example. If have a typo in your code like this one:

 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <locd>http://www.example.com</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <!-- More Url's following ... -->
  </urlset>
 

Running the test for this page you will get the following output:

You can track down the error easy and fix the typo. However this is a very simple example. Some errors messages may be not as helpful as the last one.

Test it!

As you can see sfTesterResponse::isValid() gives you as a developer a great new feature in your symfony toolkit. But it's a new features so it needs users to test it and create bug reports if something is wrong with it. So I encourage everybody who is already using the symfony 1.3 branch to test this feature so that the core developers get as much feedback as possible.

This work by Dennis Benkert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

All Blog Posts