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Acceptance tests for the Toast test framework

One notch up from integration tests, acceptance tests should test your entire application. That means actually using a web browser for most web applications.

One could argue that a CLI test is also a form of an acceptance test, with the command line acting as a stand-in for a browser. Semantics, semantics...

Toast is written in PHP which (duh) gets compiled on the server. Websites consist of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Hence, you'll need a headless browser like PhantomJS to run your acceptance tests.

Prerequisites

Install the acceptance module:

composer require --dev toast/acceptance

Acceptance testing requires Chrome or Chromium Headless to be installed.

Preparing your project

Your project needs to be made Toast-aware. For regular tests we did that via the getenv('TOAST') check; for HTTP calls it is similar. Toast's browser passes this variable as $_COOKIE['TOAST'].

In a central place - this can be any place depending on your project, as long as you're 100% sure every called page will run that bit of code - place a check for these headers and make sure your application understands it's running in test mode if they're set.

So, in test mode, use a mock database etc.

Note: you probably also want to only check this on a development URL - production should of course ignore the $_COOKIE['TOAST'] variable.

The TOAST_CLIENT environment variable is also passed in this manner.

Writing an acceptance test

To write these tests, we'll make use of the Toast\Acceptance\Browser object. This is a wrapper around Headless Chromium PHP with some convenience methods.

<?php

/** Example browser test */
return function () : Generator {
    /** We can grab an external page */
    yield function () {
        $browser = new Toast\Acceptance\Browser;
        $page = $browser->get('http://example.com');
        $ev
        assert($browser->get('http://example.com/')->getStatus() == 200);
    };
};

The get and post methods on the Browser return a Page object. See the [https://github.com/chrome-php/headless-chromium-php](Headless Chromium documentation) for more info on how to use this.

Posting data

Using the post method requires some additional parameters:

A querySelector string to identify the form we want to post;
An array of key/value pairs of data to post;
Optionally, a querySelector string to submit the form. This defaults to button[type=submit].

Testing with multiple concurrent users

A handy propery of the Browser object accepting a random session id is the possibility for an acceptance test to actually test interaction between different users of your application. E.g., user John logs in and sends a message to Mary; when Mary opens her message center, she should see the new message.

An acceptance test with multiple users would be implemented something like this:

<?php

// ...
$john = new Browser('chrome', 1);
$mary = new Browser('chrome', 2);

// Here you would first make sure both users are logged in; how that mechanism
// works exactly is up to your application of course.

// John sends his message
$johnPage = $john->post('/message/', 'form', ['to' => 'Mary', 'body' => 'Hi Mary!']);
// Mary opens the message page
$maryPage = $mary->get('/message/');
assert(strpos($maryPage->evaluate("document.querySelector('body').innerHTML")->getReturnValue(), 'Unread: 1') !== false);
// Empty mock database, so this message got ID 1
$maryPage = $mary->get('/message/1/');
assert(strpos($maryPage->evaluate("document.querySelector('body').innerHTML")->getReturnValue(), 'From: John') !== false);
// Mary read it, so now unread should be 0 again
$maryPage = $mary->get('/message/');
assert(strpos($maryPage->evaluate("document.querySelector('body').innerHTML")->getReturnValue(), 'Unread: 0') !== false);
// And finally John would see the message was read:
$johnPage = $john->get('/message/1/');
assert(strpos($johnPage->evaluate("document.querySelector('body').innerHTML")->getReturnValue(), 'Status: read') !== false);

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