PHPUnit Manual

Selenium RC is a test tool that allows you to write automated user-interface tests for web applications in any programming language against any HTTP website using any mainstream browser. It uses Selenium Core, a library that performs automated browser tasks using JavaScript. Selenium tests run directly in a browser, just as real users do. These tests can be used for both acceptance testing (by performing higher-level tests on the integrated system instead of just testing each unit of the system independently) and browser compatibility testing (by testing the web application on different operating systems and browsers).

Let us take a look at how Selenium RC is installed:

Now we can send commands to the Selenium RC server using its client/server protocol.

The PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase test case extension implements the client/server protocol to talk to Selenium RC as well as specialized assertion methods for web testing.

Example 18.1 shows how to test the contents of the <title> element of the http://www.example.com/ website.

<?php
require_once 'PHPUnit/Extensions/SeleniumTestCase.php';
 
class WebTest extends PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase
{
    protected function setUp()
    {
        $this->setBrowser('*firefox');
        $this->setBrowserUrl('http://www.example.com/');
    }
 
    public function testTitle()
    {
        $this->open('http://www.example.com/');
        $this->assertTitleEquals('Example Web Page');
    }
}
?>

Unlike with the PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase class, test case classes that extend PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase have to provide a setUp() method. This method is used to configure the Selenium RC session. See Table 18.1 for the list of methods that are available for this.

You can also run each test using a set of browsers: Instead of using setBrowser() to set up one browser you declare a public static array named $browsers in your test case class. Each item in this array describes one browser configuration. Each of these browsers can be hosted by different Selenium RC servers:

<?php
require_once 'PHPUnit/Extensions/SeleniumTestCase.php';
 
class WebTest extends PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase
{
    public static $browsers = array(
      array(
        'name'    => 'Firefox on Linux',
        'browser' => '*firefox',
        'host'    => 'my.linux.box',
        'port'    => 4444,
        'timeout' => 30000,
      ),
      array(
        'name'    => 'Safari on MacOS X',
        'browser' => '*safari',
        'host'    => 'my.macosx.box',
        'port'    => 4444,
        'timeout' => 30000,
      ),
      array(
        'name'    => 'Safari on Windows XP',
        'browser' => '*custom C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.exe -url',
        'host'    => 'my.windowsxp.box',
        'port'    => 4444,
        'timeout' => 30000,
      ),
      array(
        'name'    => 'Internet Explorer on Windows XP',
        'browser' => '*iexplore',
        'host'    => 'my.windowsxp.box',
        'port'    => 4444,
        'timeout' => 30000,
      )
    );
 
    protected function setUp()
    {
        $this->setBrowserUrl('http://www.example.com/');
    }
 
    public function testTitle()
    {
        $this->open('http://www.example.com/');
        $this->assertTitleEquals('Example Web Page');
    }
}
?>

PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase can collect code coverage information for tests run through Selenium:

Table 18.2 lists the various assertion methods that PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase provides.

Table 18.3 shows the template method of PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase:

Please refer to the documentation of Selenium Core for a reference of the commands available and how they are used.

Using the runSelenese($filename) method, you can also run a Selenium test from its Selenese/HTML specification. Furthermore, using the static attribute $seleneseDirectory, you can automatically create test objects from a directory that contains Selenese/HTML files. The specified directory is recursively searched for .htm files that are expected to contain Selenese/HTML. Example 18.3 shows an example.

<?php
require_once 'PHPUnit/Extensions/SeleniumTestCase.php';
 
class SeleneseTests extends PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase
{
    public static $seleneseDirectory = '/path/to/files';
}
?>