Lesson 13 - PHP testing - Creating Selenium acceptance tests

In the previous lesson, Introduction to acceptance tests in PHP and creating GUI, we prepared a web application that we're going to cover with acceptance tests today. To do it, we're going to use the Selenium test framework with chromedriver. The Selenium client is integrated in the Codeception PHP framework just like PHPUnit was. We've already installed it into the project, so nothing is stopping us from adding acceptance tests. Let's do it!

Cest. vs Cept

CodeCeption supports 2 formats for writing acceptance tests - "Cest" and "Cept".

They work similarly and the main difference is, that the first one is object-oriented and the second is procedural. Their default templates are as follows:

Cest

<?php

class FormCest
{
    public function _before(AcceptanceTester $I)
    {
    }

    public function _after(AcceptanceTester $I)
    {
    }

    // tests
    public function tryToTest(AcceptanceTester $I)
    {
    }
}

As you can see, a "Cest" acceptance test, is very similar to a PHPUnit test. One class method per each test. We get the object with the available methods to control the browser as a method parameter. In addition, the methods which are called before and after each test are prepared there, as in unit tests.

Cept

<?php

$I = new AcceptanceTester($scenario);
$I->wantTo('perform actions and see result');

The "Cept" acceptance test code template seems to be

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