Lesson 17 - PHP Testing - Useful AcceptanceTester class extensions

In the previous lesson, PHP Testing - More Selenium WebDriver Syntax, we completed our overview of the Selenium WebDriver syntax in Codeception. We've already mentioned that the AcceptanceTester functionality can be easily extended and the Codeception framework is well designed to do that. In today's tutorial, we're going to show how to do it, and take a look at the useful methods we can add to your testers.

The AcceptanceTester file, in the _support/ folder almost encourages us to extend the functionality. Although Codeception is a high-level framework, it obviously lacks functions specific to our particular application, such as login(), logout(), getLastEmail() and so on. It also doesn't support communication with the database or custom styled check-boxes and radio-buttons. To write tests faster, it's necessary to gather as much functionality as possible into this extension! The code is then much shorter and to cover a new functionality with tests will take only a fraction of the time.

Printing to the debug console

Since we run the tests through the CLI (Command Line Interface), we can't use functions such as echo(), print_r() and the like to print debug messages. This encourages us to implement our own method for printing to the standard error output. This output leads to the console, and in some operating systems it's even red. Let's add the following method to the AcceptanceTester class in the "_support/" folder:

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