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Email Sending

SilverStripe's test system has built-in support for testing emails sent using the Email class.

How it works

For this to work, you need to send emails using the Email class, which is generally the way that we recommend you send emails in your SilverStripe application. Here is a simple example of how you might do this:

:::php
$e = new Email();
$e->To = "someone@example.com";
$e->Subject = "Hi there";
$e->Body = "I just really wanted to email you and say hi.";
$e->send();

Normally, the send() method would send an email using PHP's mail() function. However, if you are running a SapphireTest test, then it holds off actually sending the email, and instead lets you assert that an email was sent using this method.

:::php
$this->assertEmailSent("someone@example.com", null, "/th.*e$/");

The arguments are $to, $from, $subject, $body, and can be take one of the following three forms:

A string: match exactly that string
null/''false'': match anything
A PERL regular expression (starting with '/'): match that regular expression

How to use it

Given all of that, there is not a lot that you have to do in order to test emailing functionality in your application.

Write your SilverStripe application, using the Email class to send emails.
Write tests that trigger the email sending functionality.
Include appropriate $this->assertEmailSent() calls in those tests.

That's it!

What isn't tested

It's important to realise that this email testing doesn't actually test everything that there is to do with email. The focus of this email testing system is testing that your application is triggering emails correctly. It doesn't test your email infrastructure outside of the webserver. For example:

It won't test that email is correctly configured on your webserver
It won't test whether your emails are going to be lost in someone's spam filter
It won't test bounce-handling or any other auxiliary services of email

How it's built

For those of you who want to dig a little deeper, here's a quick run-through of how the system has been built. As well as explaining how we built the email test, this is a good design pattern for making other "tricky external systems" testable:

The Email::send() method makes uses of a static object, Email::$mailer, to do the dirty work of calling mail(). The default mailer is an object of type Mailer, which performs a normal send.
Email::set_mailer() can be called to load in a new mailer object.
SapphireTest::setUp() method calls Email::set_mailer(new TestMailer()) to replace the default mailer with a TestMailer object. This replacement mailer doesn't actually do anything when it is asked to send an email; it just records the details of the email in an internal field that can be searched with TestMailer::findEmails().
SapphireTest::assertEmailSent() calls TestMailer::findEmails() to see if a mail-send was requested by the application.

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