When I wrote recently about testing web services within Zend Framework, I missed out a really key piece of information! I didn't explain how I was reading the PUT vars in my controller code in the first place - so I'll rectify that omission now.

Its very simple: I have extended Zend_Controller_Action with my own, and all controllers inherit from here. This has a routeAction() which grabs the incoming variables from a PUT request and sets them as parameters within the usual $this->getRequest() scope, then forwards on the request. Here is my class:

class My_Controller_Action extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    public function routeAction()
    {
        // handle grabbing PUT vars
        if($this->getRequest()->isPut()) {
            parse_str($this->getRequest()->getRawBody(), $params);
            foreach($params as $key => $value) {
                $this->getRequest()->setParam($key, $value);
            }
        }
        $this->_forward(strtolower($this->getRequest()->getMethod()));
    }
}

So in my controller code, I simply call out to $this->getRequest()->getParam('name') or whatever, and in my tests I can set those parameters as I showed in my other article.

I hope this makes sense, its one of those things I set up once and use a lot (and now I'll be able to refer to how I did it!), if you have any queries, comments, improvements or if this helps you then please leave a comment - I haven't come across anyone else doing anything similar but I know there must be, so let me know!