Triggering events on the fly

As far as I know, there's nothing (yet) for triggering an arbitrary event. The complication is that every event uses a unique event class, whose constructor requires specific things passing, such as entities pertaining to the event.

Today I wanted to test the emails that Commerce sends when an order completes, and to avoid having to keep buying a product and sending it through checkout, I figured I'd mock the event object with Prophecy, mocking the methods that the OrderReceiptSubscriber calls (this is the class that does the sending of the order emails). Prophecy is a unit testing tool, but its objects can be created outside of PHPUnit quite easily.

Here's my quick code:

  $order = entity_load('commerce_order', ORDER_ID);

  $prophet = new \Prophecy\Prophet;
  $event = $prophet->prophesize('Drupal\state_machine\Event\WorkflowTransitionEvent');

  $event->getEntity()->willReturn($order);

  $subscriber = \Drupal::service('commerce_order.order_receipt_subscriber');

  $subscriber->sendOrderReceipt($event->reveal());

Could some sort of generic tool be created for triggering any event in Drupal? Perhaps. We could use reflection to detect the methods on the event class, but at some point we need some real data for the event listeners to do something with. Here, I needed to load a specific order entity and to know which method on the event class returns it. For another event, I'd need some completely different entities and different methods.

We could maybe detect the type that the event method return (by sniffing in the docblock... once we go full PHP 7, we could use reflection on the return type), and the present an admin UI that shows a form element for each method, allowing you to enter an entity ID or a scalar value.

Still, you'd need to look at the code you want to run, the event listener, to know which of those you'd actually want to fill in.

Would it same more time than cobbling together code like the above? Only if you multiply it by a sufficiently large number of developers, as is the case with many developer tools.

It's the sort of idea I might have tinkered with back in the days when I had time. As it is, I'm just going to throw this idea out in the open.