Andrei Avram

There are cases when you have a base exception class which is extended by other exceptions. For a package called User, you could have a UserException which is inherited by UserNotFoundException, UserPasswordException and so on.

The base exception of your package allows you to catch any thrown exception from inside the package.

So there’s a base exception, a specific one and the service using them:

class BaseException extends Exception
{
}

class NoItemsException extends BaseException
{
}

class Service
{
    /**
     * @param array $items
     * @throws NoItemsException
     */
    public function save(array $items)
    {
        if (count($items) === 0) {
            throw new NoItemsException('Nothing to save');
        }
    }
}

And you want to catch all package exceptions:

$service = new Service();
try {
    $service->save([]);
} catch (BaseException $e) {
    die($e->getMessage());
}

And a test for the case:

class ServiceTest extends TestCase
{
    /**
     * @expectedException NoItemsException
     */
    public function testSaveWithNoItems()
    {
        $service = new Service();
        $service->save([]);
    }
}

How do you make sure NoItemsException extends BaseException?
With the above test, if you change NoItemsException to extend Exception instead of BaseException, the test will still pass, but the behaviour won’t be the expected one, because you won’t be catching the exception anymore:

Fatal error: Uncaught NoItemsException: Nothing to save... in /src/Service.php on line 20

NoItemsException: Nothing to save... in /src/Service.php on line 20

Your test must explicitly test both exceptions:

class ServiceTest extends TestCase
{
    public function testSaveWithNoItems()
    {
        $service = new Service();

        try {
            $service->save([]);
            $this->fail('No exception thrown');
        } catch (\Exception $e) {
            $this->assertInstanceOf(BaseException::class, $e);
            $this->assertInstanceOf(NoItemsException::class, $e);
        }
    }
}