Symfony 1.4 functional test not displaying new data - caching

Question

I'm running a functional test against my Symfony 1.4 project and it keeps failing because it doesn't fetch the latest data.
The test makes up a new site entry, then a survey at the site, then adds data to the survey. Each of these are on separate pages and each work. The data is definitely present in the database. After saving the last form, the survey_data, it returns to the survey page where it should get the survey details and a list of all the data items added to it. This works in dev and prod environments but in my functional tests the survey_data list is empty. Looking through the logs it doesn't try to fetch the data from the database (Doctrine & Postgres). But if I manually load the page in a browser just seconds later the list is there, and if I run a test that goes directly to the page (without clearing the database) the list is there, so the test login has the rights to see that page and the contents, but won't show it at first, as if it has cached the page survey page before the survey_data was added.
So my question is, how can I ensure my functional tests get the latest data from the DB or how can I refresh the local data object cache after saving a new item to the database?
Additional:
My functional tests extend sfPHPUnitBaseFunctionalTestCase and I use the sfBrowser class to check the contents of the pages and navigate through them

Answer 1

The issue appears to be with Doctrine caching any objects it updates for the duration of the execution. This gets cleared out after each web request in a production environment - one request per execution - but in the test environment it appears to persist between requests as they're all happening in the same execution.
It becomes troublesome when testing the process of, say, adding a new Item to a List - the List is in memory (test browser has been to its page before), the new Item gets created, saved but the link between them isn't formed in-memory.
Targeted refreshing of related objects
If you know what object you're looking to forcibly refresh you can:
$SomeDoctrineRecordObject->refreshRelated(); // for all relationships
$SomeDoctrineRecordObject->refreshRelated($relation); // for a specific one
( for the above List and Item example, you'd $list->refreshRelated('item') )
This is only useful if you're using the Doctrine object already, else you have to go pull it out of the route or database each time you need to refresh it. A more general approach is to extend the sfTestFunctional class and override the methods which might result in a relationship change and thus need to trigger a refresh.
General refreshing of all objects
The code to clear out Doctrine's object cache:
$manager = Doctrine_Manager::getInstance();
$connection = $manager->getCurrentConnection();
$tables = $connection->getTables();
foreach ( $tables as $table ) {
$table->clear();
}
And an example of how to hook it into a custom functional test object:
class myTestFunctional extends sfTestFunctional
{
public function get( $uri, $parameters = array(), $changeStack = true )
{
$this->clearEntityCache();
return parent::get( $uri, $parameters, $changeStack );
}
public function click( $name, $arguments = array(), $options = array() )
{
$this->clearEntityCache();
return parent::click( $name, $arguments, $options );
}
protected function clearEntityCache()
{
$manager = Doctrine_Manager::getInstance();
$connection = $manager->getCurrentConnection();
$tables = $connection->getTables();
foreach ( $tables as $table ) {
$table->clear();
}
}
}
Thus every time myTestFunctional gets a url or clicks to change page it clears out any Doctrine objects stored in memory. Not subtle, but effective and doesn't make the tests themselves more labourious to write!