Testing Parent-Child Self Relationship With EcomDev_PHPUnit

Question

I am working on my first extension that uses TDD principles and I am having trouble figuring out how best to write this particular test. In the module's database table, I have a column called parent_id which references the table's entity_id column. My goal is to have this type of parent-child relationship: grandparent > parent > child > grand-child > etc. To test this, I need to create some sort of dataset that includes the parent and child records. I am not sure if I need to use a fixture, expectation, or something else for this. I also need to know how to assert that the relationship was defined correctly. Can anybody give me some recommendations?

Edit:

I think I have a plan of attack for this and I will post the answer later if my idea works. I think if I create a fixture with the parent record's data, a provider with the child record, and an expectation with the relationship I may be able to use assertSame() to test it.

Answer 1

As promised, here is the solution to my problem (extra unnecessary fields and code have been excluded for clarity):

The Fixture:

tables:
    test/relationship:
        - id: 1
          parent_id: 0
          name: Parent
          created: 0000-00-00 00:00:00

The Provider:

-
    - parent_child_relationship
    - id: 2
      parent_id: 1
      name: Child
      created: 0000-00-00 00:00:00

The Expectation:

 parent_child_relationship:
    result:
        id: 1
        parent_id: 0
        name: Parent
        created: 0000-00-00 00:00:00

The test:

/**
 * Test Parent-Child relationship
 *
 * @dataProvider dataProvider
 * @loadFixture
 *
 * @param array $dataSet The expected data
 * @param array $data    The actual data
 * @return void
 */
public function testGetParent($dataSet, $data)
{
    $this->_model->setData($data);

    $result = $this->_model->getParent()->getData();

    $this->assertEquals($this->expected($dataSet)->getResult(), $result);
}

Note: I had to use assertEquals() instead of assertSame() because the integers in the resulting array are getting wrapped as strings somewhere in the process.

This solution has been overly simplified but I hope that it helps someone in the future.