PHP: Testing protected methods in CakePHP3

One of the things I recently had to deal with - PHP unit testing protected methods of the class in CakePHP 3. Few seconds of checking StackOverflow brought a nice and elegant way of checking protected methods using ReflectionClasses.

Sebastian Bergmann has a complete guide how to check non-public functionality of the classes in his archieves.

Here’s a short sample of the code using CakePHP3:

<?php
    use Search\Model\Table\SaveSearchTable;
    use Cake\TestSuite\TestCase;
    
    class SaveSearchTableTest extends TestCase
    {
        public function setUp()
        {
            $this->SavedSearches = \Cake\ORM\TableRegistry::get('SavedSearches');
        }
        
        public function testProtectedMethod()
        {
            $methodName = 'protectedMethod';
            $reflectionClass =  new \ReflectionClass('\Search\Model\Table\SaveSearchesTable');
            $method = $reflectionClass->getMethod($methodName);
            $methodResult = $method->invokeArgs( $this->SavedSearches, ['arg1', ['arg2']]);
               
            $this->assertNotEmpty($methodResult);
        }
    }