Nick BartlettPHP Developer in Minnesota

I’m using Zend Studio 7.2 on Windows 7 with Zend Framework 1.10 and Zend Server CE. I’ve created a PHPUnit test case with Zend Studio and am able to run it successfully via the command line. I’d like to use Zend Studio’s interface, but when I run the test case I get the following error “Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class PHPUnit_Util_FilterIterator in C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\Apache2\htdocs\library\pear\pear\PHPUnit\Util\FilterIterator.php on line 162″ .

Update: I got past this error. The problem was related to having both my custom install of PHPUnit and the PHPUnit built into Zend Studio on the include path of the project. Remove one of them and it should work.

After about ten hours of fighting with PEAR and PHPUnit, I think I have it installed correctly as my test case was able to run. There are a couple “official” documentation sources on how to install PHPUnit, but they only bother to cover installing it on linux. Further, PHPUnit has evolved quite a bit over the past few years and its configuration seems to have changed. I wouldn’t even bother installing PEAR if you don’t want to because the PHPUnit version from PEAR is grossly outdated. As of now, the currently version of PHPUnit is 3.4.9. If you install pear and phpunit from the command line as I tried a couple times, the phpunit.bat file will not be updated as it should, so phpunit will not work. If you open phpunit.bat and see these lines “set PHPBIN=”@php_bin@”
%PHPBIN% “@bin_dir@\phpunit” %*”, then you know something didn’t work right.

1. To install manually as I did, go to http://pear.phpunit.de/get/ to download the latest version of PHPUnit. Extract the files to a directory that is listed in the include_path of your php.ini configuration file. If you’d like to place it in a custom location, add that location to the include_path in your php.ini file.
2. Find the phpunit.bat file that you extracted, open it with a text editor and change the @php_bin@ string in it with the path to php.exe. Get rid of this line “%PHPBIN% “@bin_dir@\phpunit” %*” as it won’t be needed. On the line below, add the following line to execute phpunit.php with php ‘php -d safe_mode=Off “C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\Apache2\htdocs\library\pear\pear\phpunit.php” %*’. Remove the single quotes I added here and change the path to phpunit.php to the file’s location on your computer (the directory you extracted phpunit to).

In the end, your phpunit.bat file should look similar to this (with that paths to php.exe and phpunit.php changed to your file locations)

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@echo off
REM PHPUnit
REM
REM Copyright (c) 2002-2010, Sebastian Bergmann <sb@sebastian-bergmann.de>.
REM All rights reserved.
REM
REM Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
REM modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
REM are met:
REM
REM   * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
REM     notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
REM 
REM   * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
REM     notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
REM     the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
REM     distribution.
REM
REM   * Neither the name of Sebastian Bergmann nor the names of his
REM     contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived
REM     from this software without specific prior written permission.
REM
REM THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
REM "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
REM LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS
REM FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
REM COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
REM INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING,
REM BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
REM LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER
REM CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRIC
REM LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN
REM ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
REM POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
REM
 
set PHPBIN="C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\ZendServer\bin\php.exe"
php -d safe_mode=Off "C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\Apache2\htdocs\library\pear\pear\phpunit.php" %*

To test your install, go to the command line on windows and type “phpunit” and hit enter. If you don’t see any errors, then it’s installed correctly.

Other Issues
Using Zend Server 5.0, Zend framework 1.10, and PHPUnit 3.4.9, I had to apply a couple patches or bug fixes to get things to work.

1. I received the error “Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase” . The Zend Studio template for a test case automatically includes

   1	require_once 'PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase.php'; .

   Change this to

   1	require_once 'PHPUnit\Framework.php';

   for each test case. The bug report for this issue is located at http://framework.zend.com/issues/browse/ZF-9380

With Zend Framework, you may have the need to know the directory name of the currently executing view script. For example, I have page nicktest.php, which uses nickTestController.php and view scripts in directory /nick-test/.  In my case, I wanted to know the name of this directory from my layout so I could include additional meta data on the page if the file existed within /nick-test/.  Unfortunately searching Google did not provide me with the answer and after hours of debugging and stepping through Zend’s MVC, I found the solution.

In your bootstrap, find where the view renderer is instantiated, like this

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/**
 * setup the view layer
 */
public static function setupView() {
	self::$view = new Zend_View();
	self::$view->setEncoding('UTF-8');
	self::$viewRenderer = new Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer(self::$view);
	Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::addHelper(self::$viewRenderer);
}

Be sure to assign the $viewRenderer to self and create the public static variable within the Bootstrap class so we can access it from our layout or a controller. Then, in your controller, the below code will return “/nick-test/index.phtml” or whatever action is being processed.

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$nameAndDirectoryOfThisPage = Bootstrap::$viewRenderer->getViewScript();

By default, MySQL is enabled with strict_mode ON, which will most likely cause problems with older PHP applications written for MySQL 4.   For example, strict mode will return an error on insert statements if an empty string is provided where an integer is expected.

You may disable strict mode in one of two ways:

Open your “my.ini” file within the MySQL installation directory, and look for the text “sql-mode”.
Find:

# Set the SQL mode to strict
sql-mode=”STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”

and change to

# Set the SQL mode to strict
sql-mode=”NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”

or you can run the following in phpMyAdmin

SET @@global.sql_mode= ”;

I found the following code today that reminded me of my first attempt at programming in college. I was having a terrible time with it and was convinced I did not want to do programming as a career. Unfortunately, the code I’d written was based off an example in a book, which looked very much like the below code I found today while at work.

function calculate_easter($y) {
	$a = $y % 19;
	$b = intval($y / 100);
	$c = $y % 100;
	$d = intval($b / 4);
	$e = $b % 4;
	$f = intval(($b + 8) / 25);
	$g = intval(($b - $f + 1) / 3);
	$h = (19 * $a + $b - $d - $g + 15) % 30;
	$i = intval($c / 4);
	$k = $c % 4;
	$l = (32 + 2 * $e + 2 * $i - $h - $k) % 7;
	$m = intval(($a + 11 * $h + 22 * $l) / 451);
	$p = ($h + $l - 7 * $m + 114) % 31;
	$EasterMonth = intval(($h + $l - 7 * $m + 114) / 31); // [3 = March, 4 = April]
	$EasterDay = $p + 1; // (day in Easter Month)
	return format_date($y, $EasterMonth, $EasterDay);
}

I can’t make heads or tails of this code and leaves me thinking the person who wrote it was either very smart or very dumb. I’d lean towards the latter.

When I asked my professor for help and showed him my program full of single letter variable names, he said “have you ever heard of meaningful identifiers?”. He should have given me a smack on the head as he said it. Today, I don’t mind writing out long variable names or functions names as long as they “meaningfully” describe the variable or function. Trust me on this - it will make code maintenance much easier in the long run and will make the lives of other developers looking at your code much less painful.

A side note - the author of the above code could have just used PHP’s built in easter_date function http://us2.php.net/easter_date .