Testing YouTube API v3 with PHP and Symfony

This is a little post about how I got some tests up and running on the YouTube v3 API in a Symfony application.

This post also applies to Symfony since I’m creating an angularjs app that will use Symfony as its back-end API. In turn, this will call a load of data providers including YouTube. For my unit tests, I needed to mock the YouTube google services’ search method. For functional tests in Symfony I needed to use the DIC to inject my test YouTube classes.

To add the YouTube service to a symfony install, it can be added to the composer.json file and then referenced from any class (here are the official installation instructions).

//composer.json
"require": {
"google/apiclient": "1.0.*@beta"
...

Unit tests

To unit test the search functionality, this is an extract of my YouTubeProviderTest.php file…

//1
$this->gsYouTube = $this->getMockBuilder('\Google_Service_YouTube')
 ->disableOriginalConstructor()
 ->getMock();
  
//2      
$this->gsYouTube->search = $this->getMockBuilder('\Google_Service_YouTube_Search_Resource')
 ->disableOriginalConstructor()
 ->setMethods(array(
  'listSearch'
 ))
 ->getMock();

//3
$this->gsYouTube->search->expects($this->any())
 ->method('listSearch')
 ->will($this->throwException(new \Exception()));

//4
$emptyFile = 'sampleEmptyYouTubeListings.txt';
$this->gsYouTube->search->expects($this->any())
 ->method('listSearch')
 ->will($this->returnValue(json_decode(file_get_contents($emptyFile),true)));

1.  The first bit mocks the actual YouTube service, disabling the original constructor. If this isn’t done, a valid Google_Client object needs to be passed to it.
2. The Google_Service_YouTube object contains a public ‘search’ property, which itself is an instance of the ‘Google_Service_YouTube_Search_Resource’ class. Since its public, its pretty easy to set this to a mock object as well. Its a class with only 1 method, namely, ‘listSearch.’
3. This statement says that whenever the ‘listSearch’ method is called, throw an exception.
4. This statement says that whenever ‘listSearch’ is called, return the file ‘sampleEmptyYouTubeListings.txt’ which is a simple json string.

Functional testing

To set up the DIC such that the test environment will automatically use a test version of the YouTube service, I did the following…

All my data providers are themselves inside a service called ‘MediaProviderApi.’ For the YouTube service, inside the ‘services.xml’ file, I’ve got the following…

<!-- 1. google services-->
<service id="google_client" class="%google_provider.class%" public="false">
 <call method="setDeveloperKey">
   <argument>%google_provider.gdata_key%</argument>
 </call>
 <call method="setApplicationName">
   <argument>%google_provider.gdata_app_name%</argument>
 </call>
</service>
        
<!-- 2. youtube services-->
<service id="google_service_youtube" class="%youtube_provider.google_service_youtube.class%" public="false">
 <argument type="service" id="google_client" />
</service>

<!-- 3. youtube provider api -->        
<service id="youtube_provider" class="%youtube_provider.class%" public="false">
 <argument type="service" on-invalid="ignore" id="google_service_youtube" />
 <argument id="sonata.cache.apc" type="service"  />
</service>

1. The Google_Client service can be constructed here. By parameterising the class, its also possible to pass a test class in here too, although I’ve not needed to do that. Notice the ‘call’ statements. To create a valid Google_Client object, the google data key and application name has to be set. The values above are injected from either the config.yml or config_test.yml
2. To construct a valid Google_Service_YouTube object, a valid Google_Client must be passed to it. This is done here. By marking the service as ‘public=false’, it means it can’t be directly accessed through the container object. Since the class is parameterised, a reference to a test class can be made from the config_test.yml file.
3. Finally, the actual youtube provider service is created using the google_service_youtube service. My provider also uses sonata’s APC cache service but that’s beside the point 😉

Service configuration

To make things a bit cleaner, in the configuration.php for the service, I add a default value to the YouTube service class. This means that its only the test class that needs to be defined when necessary.

//DependencyInjection/Configuration.php

//...
->arrayNode('youtube_provider')
  ->isRequired()
  ->children()
    ->arrayNode('google_service_youtube')
    ->addDefaultsIfNotSet()
      ->children()
        ->scalarNode('class')
        ->defaultValue('Google_Service_YouTube')
        ->end()
      ->end()
    ->end()
 ->end()    
->end()//end of youtubeapi

So, in the config.yml file, its only required to define the YouTubeProvider like so…

sk_media_api:
  media_provider_api:
    debug_mode: false
    providers: 
      google_provider:
        gdata_key: %gdata_key%
        gdata_app_name: %gdata_app_name%
      youtube_provider: ~

In config_test.yml, the test class is defined

sk_media_api:
  media_provider_api:
    debug_mode: true
    providers: 
      youtube_provider:
        google_service_youtube: 
          class: Sk\MediaApiBundle\Tests\MediaProviderApi\TestGoogleServiceYouTube

So, in the functional tests, the DI container will load the test google youtube service class so that my YouTube quota isn’t immediately used up.

Hope that helps someone…