Revision as of 00:10, 30 January 2013

This page covers development using unit and functional tests to develop components and extensions to X2CRM. While not all of X2CRM has been built using test-driven development, some tools and structure have been set up for performing it when developing new features. All automated tests in X2CRM use PHPUnit, and in the case of functional testing, Selenium. To understand more what these tools are, why it is important to know about them and how they will strengthen your design and development methodology (in addition to helping you make your code more stable), the following is recommended reading:

• PHPUnit Manual, Ch. 1: Automating Tests
• PHPUnit Manual, Ch. 2: PHPUnit's Goals
• Selenium: Introduction

Introduction

What are tests?

Tests are organized into PHP classes called *test cases* that are stored within protected/tests/unit (unit tests) or protected/tests/functional (functional tests). Test cases extend one of the following classes:

CTestCase

For ordinary, non-databse unit tests; best for component classes that don't rely on tables or data that is specific to a HTTP request

CDbTestCase

For tests involving communication with a MySQL database, especially if that communication involves a change in any data.

WebTestCase (extends CWebTestCase)

For tests that involve web browser actions.

Anatomy of a typical test case

Running test cases

phpunit path/to/TestCase.php

phpunit directory/

Installation

For the most up-to-date information on how to install PHPUnit, see Chapter 3: Installing PHPUnit in the official PHPUnit manual. In addition to PHPUnit, you will need each of the following PHPUnit extensions:

• DBUnit
• PHP_Invoker
• PHPUnit_Selenium
• PHPUnit_Story

See the installation guide for more information on how to obtain these extensions.

Setting up a test database

A few very important points to note about tests involving a database connection:

• A different database will be used than the live database
• The contents of each of the test database's tables will be fixed at the beginning of each test using *fixtures*
• All database records generated during tests or through manual interaction will be purged when fixtures for the table in question are used

After creating the test database, the following steps can be used to set it up for database testing:

1. Copy the installer files back into the root of the web application: index.php, initialize.php, requirements.php, and initialize_pro.php if on professional edition.
2. Re-run the installer, but enable "Testing Database".

Functional Testing with Selenium

An advanced PHPUnit/Selenium configuration involving multiple network hosts, operating systems and web browsers. PHPUnit (1) begins a test by starting browser sessions on a remote host running Selenium RC (2). Selenium then runs the commands sent to it from PHPUnit on the web browsers. The browsers open the web application in testing mode (3) and run automated instructions.

If it is desired to automate in-browser tests, the following must be ensured:

1. You have Selenium RC running on a computer somewhere
2. The <selenium> section in the configuration file protected/tests/phpunit.xml is set properly. For information on how to configure this, see PHPUnit Manual Appendix C: The XML