Yii 2 Codeception Fixtures Gotcha

We use MongoDB (important point) with our Yii 2 applicaton.

While setting up our API test fixtures in our Cest file, $I->grabFixture was not able to find the data we wanted eventhough we have defined it within the dataFile.

[yii\base\ErrorException] Trying to get property 'client_id' of non-object

Here’s what the dataFile looks like.

<?php
// This doesn't work.
return [
    'client_one' =>
    [
        'client_id' => 'mytestclient',
    ],
];

After some experimentation, we’ve found that we need to set the _id within the dataFile in order to get $I->grabFixture to work properly.

<?php
// This works.
return [
    'client_one' =>
    [
        '_id' => new MongoDB\BSON\ObjectId('60ea4a7db868d02fe478b6a4'),
        'client_id' => 'mytestclient',
    ],
];