Video Tutorial on Unit Testing with the Zend Framework with Zend_Test and PHPUnit

A useful video tutorial on how to setup unit testing with the Zend Framework using Eclipse PDT or Zend Studio:

Error ‘php.exe’ is not recognized as an internal or external command when calling phpunit on Windows XP/Vista/7

This may be caused by the PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN environment variable not being set correctly.

To fix this go to Advanced System Settings in Control Panel/System & Maintenance/System.

Select Environment Variables.

Find variable PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN and change the value from ./php.exe to the correct path\to\php.exe on your system.

In Eclipse PDT, select Run > External Tools > External Tools Configurations…

Click on the New launch configuration icon.

Give it a name. “PHPUnitConfig” for example.

Below is a screenshot of sample settings. Modify according to your evironment.

Configure a phpunit.xml file in Eclipse PDT

On the Main tab, under Location set the path to your php.exe file.

Set Working Directory to: ${workspace_loc}

Set Arguments to: C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\phpunit --configuration ${workspace_loc}\${resource_path}

Make sure to set the path to the installation location of phpunit.

Select your phpunit.xml file in the PHP Explorer panel and from the main menu, select Run > External Tools > PHPUnitConfig.

To reference the next sibling nodes in a SimpleXMLElement object in PHP you can use the xpath axes “following-sibling” as shown below:

$nextSibling = $element->xpath("following-sibling::ElementName");

To reference the first sibling following the element:

$firstSiblingElement = $nextSibling[0];

Reference: XPath Axes