So I've taken it upon myself to do a bit of reading and messing around with the Selenium Extension for PHPUnit and I wanted to share a bit of what I learned. Looking around on the internet, I didn't find a whole lot of real good information on the Selenium2TestCase API so I want to provide a little bit of depth in some of those areas. I'm going to cover a few areas of interest and provide some code examples where relevant.

Getting set up

I have to admit, this is the one area where I probably didn't go as deep as I should have. I interacted with the the setBrowser and setBrowserUrl methods as a way to get started, but here's a little run down of what some of these methods look like.

setBrowser(String $browser) - Set the browser 
that Selenium will launch
setBrowserUrl(String $url) - Set the base 
URL for the tests, allows you to refer to relative paths in 
the tests
setHost(String $host) - Set the hostname 
for the connection of the Selenium Server
setPort(int $port) - Set the port for the 
connection to the Selenium Server

Selecting items

The coolest part of Selenium is that you can programmatically interact with a web browser, you get to tell it what to do and where to go. That being said, we first need to know how we're going to be selecting items. Most everyone is familiar with jQuery, so this concept shouldn't be new to many. There are a couple ways to select elements on the page that you're working on and here they are.

byId(String $id) - this will select 
the element that matches the id attribute
that you provide
byClassName(String $className) - this will
select the element the matches the class 
attribute you provide
byName(String $name) - this method matches
on the name attribute you provide
byXPath(String $xpath) - returns based on 
XPath pattern you provide
byCssSelector(String $selector) - returns based 
on the CSS Selector (uses # -for ids, . for classes, etc)
byLinkText(String $linkText) - not entirely 
sure, just stumbled upon this in the source, 
going to guess it matches link text

Interacting with items

Now comes the fun stuff, here's where we specify the actions we want to perform on our items. I'm certainly not going to go through all the available options here, but I'm going to try to touch on some of the commonly used, or what I perceive to be commonly used, items and get you started there.

click() - performs a click
clear() - clears the value of the element
value() - returns the value of the element
value($value) - sets the value of the element to $value
text() - returns the text of the element
submit() - submits the element

$username = $this->byId('username');
$password = $this->byId('password');
$submit = $this->byId('submit');
$body = $this->byCssSelector('body');


$username->value('test');
$password->value('password');
$submit->click();
$this->assertNotContains($body->text(),'Invalid Login');

Getting around quicker

While it certainly is cool to drive around with a series of programmatic clicks, it can be tedious; so if you keep your tests focused on a single area of your application you can get to the starting point of your test by using the url() method. It took me a while to find this, because SeleniumTestCase has an open(String $url) method that makes more sense to me from a naming standpoint. url() will navigate your browser to the url that you provide, which means you don't have to spend a ton of time faux-clicking through your navigation menus and things of that nature.

Conclusion

Hopefully you found this somewhat helpful, please know that there are other options available for interacting with Selenium. WebDriver is a common one, perhaps when I get a chance to look into it more closely, I'll be able to write a post similar to this one. As always, I'm interested to hear your comments, concerns and corrections that you may have for this post. Thanks for checking it out!

Fin