Question

Currently, I have a PHPUnit test case that extends PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase. Each function that starts requires a $this->setBrowserUrl() and defaults to starting a new Firefox browser window with each function call.

I want to have a test case that launches the browser for specific functions, but not launch the browser for other functions, as to save the resources and time it takes in opening and closing the browser. Is it possible for me to have such a file?

Answer 1

Figured out a custom solution using PHPUnit annotations (and wrote a blog post about it!)

http://blog.behance.net/dev/custom-phpunit-annotations

EDIT: Adding some code here, as to make my answer more complete 🙂

In short, use custom annotations. In your setUp(), parse the doc block to grab annotations, and tag tests with different qualities. This would allow you to tag certain tests to run with a browser, and certain tests to run without.

protected function setUp() {

  $class      = get_class( $this );
  $method     = $this->getName();
  $reflection = new ReflectionMethod( $class, $method );
  $doc_block  = $reflection->getDocComment();

  // Use regex to parse the doc_block for a specific annotation
  $browser = self::parseDocBlock( $doc_block, '@browser' );

  if ( !self::isBrowser( $browser )
    return false;

  // Start Selenium with the specified browser

} // setup

private static function parseDocBlock( $doc_block, $tag ) {

 $matches = array();

  if ( empty( $doc_block ) )
    return $matches;

  $regex = "/{$tag} (.*)(\\r\\n|\\r|\\n)/U";
  preg_match_all( $regex, $doc_block, $matches );

  if ( empty( $matches[1] ) )
    return array();

  // Removed extra index
  $matches = $matches[1];

  // Trim the results, array item by array item
  foreach ( $matches as $ix => $match )
    $matches[ $ix ] = trim( $match );

  return $matches;

} // parseDocBlock