Reflection and Call-by-Reference

When refactoring the unit tests for the Joomla CMS router, I stumbled upon several cases, where the Subject under Test was mocked or decorated (wrapped) in order to access protected methods. While it might be ok to test non-public members on legacy code (deriving classes may depend on it - you get this mess, if you don't do TDD), it is never acceptable to run tests on a mock or a wrapper. Those mocks or wrappers are not your Subject under Test!

ReflectionMethod::invoke()

So I started to refactor these mocks and decorators using the Reflection API, which allows to make private and protected members accessible. So I did something like this (simplified) in my test:

public function testCallOfNonPublicMethod()
{
    $object = new SomeClass();
    $param  = $this->getMock('ParamClass');
    
    $method = new ReflectionMethod('SomeClass', 'someMethod');
    $method->setAccessible(true);
    
    $this->assertEquals($expected, $method->invoke($object, $param);
}

The advantage is, that the code tells you exactly what happens to the Subject under Test. The method is set to be visible and then invoked on the object. But at one point I ran into an unexpected warning:

Warning: Parameter 1 to SomeClass::someMethod() expected to be a reference, value given in SomeTest.php on line 42

That was weird, especially, as the parameter was an object, which always is passed by reference.

Some debugging later, I found PHP4 relicts, in this case, a method like

class SomeClass {
    protected function someMethod(ParamClass &$param) {
        ...
    }
}

The problem is, that PHPUnit internally at one point clones the arguments (or otherwise turn them into values; I didn't investigate that further), so the reference gets lost. If the method is called directly, the reference gets transported, but that's not possible, because method is protected.

On PHP4, the call could have been changed to

$this->assertEquals($expected, $method->invoke($object, &$param);

to solve the problem. This Call-by-Reference has though been deprecated in PHP5, and removed in PHP 5.4:

Fatal error: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in SomeTest.php on line 42

So that is no option as well.

Ok, now I understood, why the Subject under Test was wrapped. But still, it is never acceptable to run tests on a mock or a wrapper. So how can this be solved?

ReflectionMethod::invokeArgs()

The trick is to get the reference one level down, so PHPUnit's cloning (or whatever) does not destroy the reference any more. Just like the call_user_func() and call_user_func_array() methods, ReflectionMethod provides a way to pass the method arguments using a single array. For methods with call-by-reference parameters, the test code now looks like this:

public function testCallOfNonPublicMethod()
{
    $object = new SomeClass();
    $param  = $this->getMock('ParamClass');
    
    $method = new ReflectionMethod('SomeClass', 'someMethod');
    $method->setAccessible(true);
    
    $this->assertEquals($expected, $method->invokeArgs($object, array(&$param));
}

As you can see, the reference operator can be explicitly specified without any violations.

GreenCape/reflector

I wrote a small class, that makes using Reflection like this a bit easier. The above code is reduced to

use GreenCape\Reflection\Reflector;
...
public function testCallOfNonPublicMethod()
{
    $object = new SomeClass();
    $param  = $this->getMock('ParamClass');

    $this->assertEquals($expected, Reflector::invokeArray($object, 'someMethod', array(&$param));
}

You can get Reflector from the GreenCape repository at GitHub or at Packagist. It does a lot more than described here, e.g. access to non-public members of the complete inheritance chain of an object.

Feedback is of course always welcome!

Reflection and Call-by-Reference was published on .