Ok since this got two votes I guess other people are interested.
I decided to get my shovel out and was pleasantly surprised (so far anyway) that this wasn’t at all difficult to pull off.
I remembered that each Symfony2 component can be used in a stand alone mode and therefore that I could create the validator myself.
Looking at the docs at: https://github.com/symfony/Validator/blob/master/ValidatorFactory.php
I realised that since there was a ValidatorFactory it was trivial to create a validator (especially for validation done by annotations which I am, although if you look at the docblock on the page I linked above you’ll also find ways to validate xml and yml).
First:
# Symfony >=2.1
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Validation;
# Symfony <2.1
use Symfony\Component\Validator\ValidatorFactory;
and then:
# Symfony >=2.1
$validator = Validation::createValidatorBuilder()->enableAnnotationMapping()->getValidator();
# Symfony <2.1
$validator = ValidatorFactory::buildDefault()->getValidator();
$errors = $validator->validate($entity);
$this->assertEquals(0, count($errors));
I hope this helps anyone else whose conscience wouldn’t allow them to just use WebTestCase ;).