WebDriver!

Boilerplate

This is the supporting material for my session at True North PHP. It was certainly not a tutorial, but instead was a quick introduction to things, and plant some of my favourite rants into people's (unsuspecting) heads.

Important Introductory Bits

WebDriver is just a library. It is not a framework
It is also a [draft] W3C standard
It will not test your application, it will drive your browser
Geeks are bad at naming. Names Matter somewhat explains the various moving parts -- and how to refer to things.
All (current) PHP bindings use Remote WebDriver
WebDriver for PHP is a very splinter-y place; I use my fork of Facebook's implementation -- but spend the time to experiment with them all and see which one aligns with your own set of opinions. There is lots of howto-ish things in that repo...
There are two halves, well, its more like 20/80 parts; the 'session' and 'elements'

Setup

All the moving parts for PHPWebDriver and this project uses are installable through PEAR.

$ sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
$ sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit
$ sudo pear channel-discover element-34.github.com/pear
$ sudo pear install -f element-34/SaunterPHP
$ sudo pear install -f element-34/PHPBrowserMobProxy

Page Objects

When you are writing scripts you will end up with a script and one or more page object.

Scripts...

are collected by the runner
executes methods (actions) on page objects
contains asserts
are pretty un-interesting

Page Objects...

represent either a full page or part of a page
find and interact with elements
does not contain elements that are in other elements
synchronize

A Sample Page Object

Synchronization

Synchronization is hard (let's go shopping!). The important thing to remember is Explicit is better than Implicit.

$w = new \PHPWebDriver_WebDriverWait($this->session, 30, 0.5, array("locator" => $this->locators['fancy iframe']));
$iframe = $w->until(
  function($session, $extra_arguments) {
    list($type, $string) = $extra_arguments['locator'];
    return $session->element($type, $string);
  }
);

Third Party Crap

If you are not responsible for developing something on your application, it shouldn't be there in your automation environment. Use feature switches, but if you don't have that, blacklist through a proxy.

$driver = new \PHPWebDriver_WebDriver();
self::$client = new \PHPBrowserMobProxy_Client("localhost:8080");

$additional_capabilities = array();
$proxy = new \PHPWebDriver_WebDriverProxy();
$proxy->httpProxy = self::$client->url;
$proxy->add_to_capabilities($additional_capabilities);
self::$session = $driver->session('firefox', $additional_capabilities);

self::$client->blacklist('.*\/favicon\.ico/.*', 306);
self::$client->blacklist('.*\.facebook\.net/.*', 306);
self::$client->blacklist('.*\.twitter\.com/.*', 306);
self::$client->blacklist('.*\.github\.com/.*', 306);

Javascript Executor

Welcome to the future... where Canvas and ^$(*@)-ing JS widgets rule the world. These are black boxes [of pain].

$this->session->execute(array(
                            "script" => 'return document.title;',
                            "args" => array()
                            )
                          );

The args key can also take a reference to an Element that can be used in the script itself. Ooooo. Meta.

$options = array("chain" => $chain, "attrName" => $property);
$this->session->execute(array(
                             "script" => 'return arguments[0].fp_getPropertyValue(arguments[1]);',
                             "args" => array(array("ELEMENT" => $this->movie->getID()),
                                             $options)
                             ));

Just remember to return a value if you are not just poking things.

Mobile?

WebDriver has desired capabilities and required capabilities. (Or will have required capabilities soon-ish.)

$this->session = self::$driver->session("android");
$this->session = self::$driver->session("iphone");
$this->session = self::$driver->session("ipad");

To the Cloud!

You do not want to deal with the browser permutation madness... outsource it! To something like Sauce Labs. Since WebDriver [on PHP] is Remote WebDriver, just point it at their server.

$username = "yourusername";
$key = "your key";
$command_executor = "http://" . $username . ":" . $key . "@ondemand.saucelabs.com:80/wd/hub";
self::$driver = new PHPWebDriver_WebDriver($command_executor);

disclaimer: I'm a Sauce Labs partner, ask me for my partner discount code

Frameworks

WebDriver is actually really low level and you will want to write some helper-ish things around it. SaunterPHP is one such framework based on the last decade of me doing this sort of thing. (And Open Source. Of course!)

rivlinp / tnphp-webdriver