Selenium 2 browser instances for a single test - selenium

Question

I am using phpunit as a wrapper for selenium. I have a test that simulates two users on the same website. So I need to have two browsers open that can't share cookies - it can't just be two windows. They are the same test, so for example a user would click something in the first browser instance and the other user would look for a change in the other browser instance. Logging out and back in as the other user is not an option.
Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this at all, but the pattern might work.
Unfortunately the PHPUnit WebDriver implementation is tightly coupled to the unit test framework code. However, you could try something like this in order to have 2 different web driver instances running in parallel:
<?php
class WebTest extends PHPUnit_Extensions_Selenium2TestCase
{
private $driver1;
private $driver2;
protected function setUp()
{
$this->driver1 = $this->createDriver();
$this->driver2 = $this->createDriver();
}
protected function createDriver()
{
$driver = new PHPUnit_Extensions_Selenium2TestCase();
$driver->setBrowser('firefox');
$driver->setBrowserUrl('http://www.example.com/');
$driver->start();
return $driver;
}
public function testTitle()
{
$this->driver1->url('http://www.example.com/');
$this->driver1->assertEquals('Example WWW Page', $this->title());
$this->driver2->url('http://www.example.com/');
$this->driver2->assertEquals('Example WWW Page', $this->title());
}
protected function tearDown() {
$this->driver1->stop();
$this->driver2->stop();
}
}
?>
Theres quite a lot that could potentially go wrong with this but you could try it.
Alternatively you could ditch the PHPUnit integration for this particular test/tests and use a dedicate PHP WebDriver API like PHP-SeleniumClient, which would give you better control over the WebDriver instances.