Browser session in setUp(), tearDown(), no per testcase setup? - selenium

Question

I've previously written some selenium tests using ruby/rspec, and found it quite powerful. Now, I'm using Selenium with PHPUnit, and there are a couple of things I'm missing, it might just be because of inexperience. In Ruby/RSpec, I'm used to being able to define a "global" setup, for each test case, where I, among other things, open up the browser window and log into my site.
I feel that PHPUnit is a bit lacking here, in that 1) you only have setUp() and tearDown(), which are run before and after each individual test, and that 2) it seems that the actual browser session is set up between setUp() and the test, and closed before tearDown().
This makes for a bit more clutter in the tests themselves, because you explicitly have to open the page at the beginning, and perform cleanups at the end. In every single test. It also seems like unnecessary overhead to close and reopen the browser for every single test, in stead of just going back to the landing page.
Are there any alternative ways of achieving what I'm looking for?

Answer 1

What I have done in the past is to make a protected method that returns an object for the session like so:
protected function initBrowserSession() {
if (!$this->browserSession) {
$this->setBrowser('*firefox');
$this->setBrowserUrl('http://www.example.com/');
//Initialize Session
$this->open('http://www.example.com/login.php');
// Do whatever other setup you need here
}
$this->browserSession = true;
}
public function testSomePage() {
$this->initBrowserSession();
//Perform your test here
}
You can't really use the setupBefore/AfterClass functions since they are static (and as such you won't have access to the instance).
Now, with that said, I would question your motivation for doing so. By having a test that re-uses a session between tests you're introducing the possibility of having side-effects between the tests. By re-opening a new session for each test you're isolating the effects down to just that of the test. Who cares about the performance (to a reasonable extent at least) of re-opening the browser? Doing so actually increases the validity of the test since it's isolated. Then again, there could be something to be said for testing a prolonged session. But if that was the case, I would make that a separate test case/class to the individual functionality test...

Answer 2

Although I agree with #ircmaxell that it might be best to reset the session between tests, I can see the case where tests would go from taking minutes to taking hours just to restart the browser.
Therefore, I did some digging, and found out that you can override the start() method in a base class. In my setup, I have the following:
<?php
require_once 'PHPUnit/Extensions/SeleniumTestCase.php';
class SeleniumTestCase extends PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase
{
public function setUp() {
parent::setUp();
// Set browser, URL, etc.
$this->setBrowser('firefox');
$this->setBrowserUrl('http://www.example.com');
}
public function start() {
parent::start();
// Perform any setup steps that depend on
// the browser session being started, like logging in/out
}
}
This will automatically affect any classes that extend SeleniumTestCase, so you don't have to worry about setting up the environment in every single test.
I haven't tested, but it seems likely that there is a stop() method called before tearDown() as well.
Hope this helps.