Events dispatched from Mailer

[ju5t]

@driesvints sorry for barging into your notifications like this, but because you made the PR for Symfony's mailer, I'm trying my luck here. Sorry for that!

We have an event listener on Illuminate\Mail\Events\MessageSent. We have a requirement to store outgoing emails and link them to a related model. The MessageSent event only contains a message along with a data array. We enhance the data array with buildViewDataUsing() in the Mailable, which gives us the data we need in our listener. All well so far. It works.

Testing this beast is different. Our test looks like this:

Mail::fake();
Event::fake();

Mail::to('[email protected]')
    ->send(new AwesomeEmail());

Event::assertDispatched(MessageSent::class, function ($event) {
    $this->assertEquals($event->data['__private'], 'private');
});

This does't catch the MessageSent event, neither did it when removing Mail::fake(). I did some source surfing, and saw that Mailer accepts Dispatcher as an argument when constructing the class. The MailManager is doing this, it fetches events from the IoC and passes it on.

I get all of this.

But I can't wrap my head around why Event::fake() isn't seeing the MessageSent event. I have guesses:

• It's because the mailer is initialised before I run Event::fake() and as such it can't catch the event? I'm not sure.
• It's because our tests use the ArrayTransport which doesn't send an event? Removing MAIL_MAILER from my phpunit.xml has no effect.

The Framework tests for MessageSent mocks the dispatcher and creates its own Mailer. I'm afraid that if I do that, I end up mocking too much; and it's not necessarily something I prefer.

How can I make my test work?

[driesvints]

Hmm, I'll investigate this. Can you create a repo?

Heya, thanks for reporting.

We'll need more info and/or code to debug this further. Can you please create a repository with the command below, commit the code that reproduces the issue as separate commits on the main/master branch and share the repository here? Please make sure that you have the latest version of the Laravel installer in order to run this command. Please also make sure you have both Git & the GitHub CLI tool properly set up.

laravel new bug-report --github="--public"

Please do not amend and create a separate commit with your custom changes. After you've posted the repository, we'll try to reproduce the issue.

Thanks!

[ju5t]

First time for me I'm raising a bug report here so sorry if things are a bit clumsy on my end.

ju5t/bug-report@8650fd6

In our own app we'd like to assert the event as well by passing a closure, but that's out of scope for now I guess :)

[driesvints]

Ah sorry @ju5t. I just realized this indeed won't work. You can't assert that the MessageSent event was fired because it doesn't get fired with the MailFake class.

[driesvints]

We're using the ArrayTransport in our tests so I assume Mail::fake is only really useful when you want to assert things?

yes indeed.

Would there be another way to test the event without mocking everything?

I don't think it makes sense to combine this with mail mocking. You already can assert the mail was sent so you can be sure the event will be sent as well.

[ju5t]

I have no doubts about the event itself. We're using buildViewDataUsing to pass additional data to the view. Coincidentally, this data is also available in the MessageSent event, which is where we fetch the data from in our e-mail logger. The only thing I want to know is if that data is available in the event.

I found that the below doesn't work by the way.

Event::assertDispatched(MessageSent::class, function ($event) {
    $this->assertSame('foo', $event->data['__private']);
});

But this does:

Event::assertDispatched(MessageSent::class);

(in our own app we appear to have a completely different issue for some reason)

[ju5t]

I found something weird in our app. I understand that this is something incredibly hard to help with, but I hope you can give me some directions where to look next. If there is paid support somewhere or if you know someone who can help with this, there is budget for it!

In Illuminate\Mail\Mailer there is dispatchSentEvent:

protected function dispatchSentEvent($message, $data = [])
{
    if ($this->events) {
        $this->events->dispatch(
            new MessageSent($message, $data)
        );
    }
}

As I said, for some weird reason it doesn't emit the event when I use Event::fake. When I replace $this-events->dispatch(.. for Event::dispatch(new MessageSent($message, $data));, it works. This problem isn't there in a new Laravel app so it's 100% on us.

In dispatchSentEvent I added some debug statements:

$events = app('events');

ray(get_class($events));
ray(get_class($this->events));

Turns out the IoC returns Illuminate\Support\Testing\Fakes\EventFake as expected, but $this->events returns Illuminate\Events\Dispatcher. Which is probably why it doesn't work for us.

I know $this->events is set in the MailManager, what I don't get is why it's not being replaced by our faked instance. My best bet would be the order in which things are running but I have no clue.

I'm guessing this is why some people don't write tests, it can be pretty difficult at times :)

[BobbyBorisov]

hey @ju5t I am experiencing the same issue when upgrading from laravel 8 to laravel 9 my tests suddenly started to fail. Before upgrading $this->events was returning the EventFake, now on laravel 9 its returning Dispatcher and I am wondering how to test my event. Did you manage to fix it somehow? Cheers

[ju5t]

hi @BobbyBorisov, I don't believe we did. I checked our app, but it lacks a test for the behaviour we needed it for. It requires a manual test which we documented in our test procedure (yea not great).