Quick Guide To Drupal Testing

What is Drupal used for?

Since Drupal is a content management system, it has various features specific to certain domains. For example, multilingual support for the marketing team, etc. In this section of the Drupal testing tutorial, we will pick up only generalized features that can be used with every domain.

Open-source

Open-source technologies have become among the top-favorite software types for developers and testers. Drupal is no exception here. The CMS, its founder, and the people behind its development at its early stages have always been vocal about open-source technologies and their support.

While it is popularly known that open-source tools generally come free of cost with a license to modify the software as you like or per your requirements. Along with this, the open-source nature of Drupal brings three important things:

• Inclusion of new tech – Open-source software is developed by the people who also use it. They are independent developers and tech-savvy people who are updated with the latest technologies in the market. As a result, they know their importance and include the same concepts in Drupal to improve it and up to the current standards. These include high-level security standards as well as front-end technologies such as React.
• Large community by our side – Developers and testers starting their Drupal journey will come across questions that will not be available on the official documentation. With Drupal’s large community, you can get answers to your queries and further assistance to help you develop things quickly.
• Contains essential features – Similar to the effect we saw in the first point, another area where open-source developers prove to be the best is in the features. If Drupal does not have a particular feature and the community and its users are eager for it to be present, the open-source community generally develops it. It works based on the audience’s requirements without management or seeking profitable interests.

Customizable

In our recent guide on WordPress testing, we discussed plugins and templates that work as core pillars in a WordPress website. Both of these concepts exist in the Drupal content management system, too, but the “plugin” is replaced with “modules” here.

Drupal modules provide additional functionalities based on the requirements of the developers and the organizations. This plug-in system works as “install only what you need.” Similarly, themes and templates are the visual representation of the web application.

This depends on what type of web application you are thinking of developing. Many Drupal themes and modules are available online to help you lift your web application within a few minutes.

Integrations

Integrations are third-party software that performs specific tasks. For instance, a payment gateway is a software that helps your users execute transactions and give you a complete report as an administrator.

Without integration, Drupal developers would have spent much time reinventing the wheel. But fortunately, all we need is to search for the functionality and install the integration to our CMS backend system.

Source

These integrations may include a chat feature, payment feature, render interactive models, etc. Drupal supports hundreds of integrations for you to satisfy your requirements.

Security

The security of a website is the topmost priority for organizations and individuals. A website contains a lot of sensitive data, and the developers and organizations are responsible for its protection.

Drupal has secure mechanisms built into the platform to prevent attacks and close vulnerabilities. In addition, you can also integrate security features through integrations or modules to add additional security layers.

Popular Drupal-powered websites

According to a source, Drupal maintains its reputation as the finest CMS for heavy-traffic websites. Currently, there are over a million websites on the web that Drupal and its community support.

In this section of the Drupal testing guide, let’s look at the popular websites built on Drupal CMS.

Tesla

Tesla, led by Elon Musk, is one of the most well-known automotive companies specializing in electric car production. Its official website is sleek, clear, and interactive. Tesla is built on Drupal 8 and makes a big impression on users with numerous animations and videos.

Government of Australia’s website

As with many other governments, Australia’s government has also built its website with Drupal CMS. Australia has 100+ government entities scattered across the country. To meet the needs of the users, they chose Drupal to optimize all of the digital services they provide to millions of Australians.

NASA

The space agency of the United States of America has chosen Drupal to build its web application. The NASA website provides a plethora of helpful content to its users and functions as a holistic news and knowledge resource.

These are three popular organizations that have opt-in for Drupal. Besides, there are tons more that are just a Google search away.

Ways to perform Drupal testing

After getting to know the Drupal framework, learning the nuances of testing in it will help us release a robust product to our users.

Since Drupal is a CMS, naturally, all the things that apply to web testing are also used on a higher level. Therefore, discussing them in a post solely dedicated to Drupal might be redundant and boring.

However, if you are interested in it and know more in-depth, we have a detailed guide on the testing website.

Drupal testing is divided into two parts:

• Manual Drupal testing
• Automated Drupal testing

Both have their use cases and take care of things at different levels.

Manual Drupal testing

When you manually test a Drupal-based website, you try to operate on a website similar to a user. Most bugs identified here fall into the user interface or usability domain category.

In addition, we need it to manually inspect the backend technologies as the web app is just the display for the CMS. Before starting automation, it’s important to check if a change in pricing in the backend is reflected on your eCommerce website product page. Also, check whether it is reflected in the product when seen in the pricing section.

Besides the basic twist of backend inspection, you can follow manual testing paradigms in API testing, etc.

Automated Drupal testing

The area that can be challenging in Drupal-based web applications is automated Drupal testing. Drupal offers automated testing that you can leverage for your projects. The following sections of this Drupal testing guide will focus on this aspect.

How to perform automated Drupal testing?

Drupal has a necessary need to perform automated testing on its websites. Hence, they put down a significant amount of focus when they talk about securities and testing. As a result, one can find several automation software integrations associated with Drupal, such as PHPUnit and Behat.

But, on their official website, Drupal states that PHPUnit is the standard they follow for Drupal versions 8, 9, and 10. Before that, Drupal had SimpleTest, which is currently removed from the library.

Drupal recommends the use of PHPUnit for automated Drupal testing. Let’s check out the PHPUnit framework in brief.

What is PHPUnit?

As we dissect the name of the PHPUnit framework, we understand that it is related to “PHP” and “Unit,” i.e., a framework that allows for unit testing in PHP. It is widely used for PHP-based applications and development frameworks that produce PHP code (even if the developer has not written a single line of it).

The power of PHPUnit comes from the usage of three things:

Assertions

As a tester, you must already be familiar with assertions. Many unit testing frameworks, such as JUnit or TestNG, use assertions to test a part of the application and combine them to run regressions.

An example of PHPUnit assertions is as follows:

<?php declare(strict_types=1);
use PHPUnitFrameworkTestCase;

final class ArrayHasKeyTest extends TestCase
{
    public function testFailure(): void
    {
        $this->assertArrayHasKey('foo', ['bar' => 'baz']);
    }
}

Here, the assertion assertArrayHasKey is used to check whether the $array has the $key. As you may find interesting here, the $this->assert function is used to call the assert function, unlike other frameworks like PyUnit that calls self.assert. This is a personal choice provided by PHPUnit with no preference for one over another. The tester is free to change this line to self::assertTrue() if required.

Surprisingly, PHPUnit has a long list of assertions, with each function written to achieve a specific objective. Listing all of them here is not feasible. Therefore, if interested, you can go through their assertion library once.

Annotations

The annotations, as used in JUnit, are a symbol to portray the metadata of the function to follow. For instance, @afterClass or @covers, etc.

An example of annotations in PHPUnit:

<?php declare(strict_types=1);
use PHPUnitFrameworkTestCase;

final class MyTest extends TestCase
{
    /**
     * @afterClass
     */
    public static function tearDownSomeSharedFixtures(): void
    {
        // ...
    }

    /**
     * @afterClass
     */
    public static function tearDownSomeOtherSharedFixtures(): void
    {
        // ...
    }
}

As a note, annotations should be used carefully as they can alter the test execution and sometimes skip them entirely.

XML Config File

The XML configuration file contains different tags that define the settings and configuration of the PHP file during execution. This file is read, and the tests are executed according to the tags the tester has set. For instance, backupGlobals is a tag to back up all global and super-global variables before the test execution. Once the execution is complete, these backups will be restored.

Similar to assertions in PHPUnit, the XML Config File’s attribute list is also very long. Therefore, we recommend going through them on their official website.

PHPUnit with Drupal

Drupal recommends using PHPUnit for applications built on Drupal 8 and above. However, since Drupal is a content management system, there will be many things to take care of. If it had been just the front end, we could have done unit testing and JavaScript testing and been done with it.

But when it comes to a website that is ready for the end-users and has the potential of scaling in the future, you have to take care of the following components with PHPUnit:

• Browser testing
• JavaScript testing
• PHPStorm
• PHP Unit testing
• Mock testing
• PhantomJavaScript, along with PHPUnit
• User session testing
• Kernel testing

All these types of testing may take a considerable amount of time, and a complete post can be dedicated to them. Therefore, this post will pick out the most popular and important testing paradigms – Browser testing, JavaScript testing, and Unit testing.

Browser testing in Drupal

Browser testing in Drupal means testing the browser functionalities and web app functionalities. To accomplish this, Drupal uses BrowserTestBase, where each of your tests will run. As the framework states, the test cases written in BrowserTestBase are not dependent on the module or theme installed. Therefore, your test cases won’t be affected by a change in these two things. Although, if you have any special requirements to write specific test cases, you can achieve that using Behat.

To write a browser test in Drupal using BrowserTestBase, we need to go through the following four steps:

• First, extend the BrowserTestBase class:

namespace DrupalTests
ulesFunctional;

use DrupalTestsBrowserTestBase;
class UiPageTest extends BrowserTestBase {

• Next, define the modules inside this class to enable during the test run:

protected static $modules = ['<module_name', '<module_name>'];

This part is crucial for browser tests because the modules, except the core ones, are not enabled by default. Each Drupal test creates a new Drupal instance that is reset and starts afresh.

• You need to define the default theme for the test. This is important for Drupal 8.8 and above.

protected $defaultTheme = <theme_name>;

• This step is optional and depends on the type of test the tester is writing in Drupal. So, if the test case requires a specific setup from the Drupal instance, we need to use this function called setup() to do all those things.

protected function setUp(): void {
    parent::setUp();
    $type = $this->container->get('entity_type.manager')->getStorage('node_type')
      ->create([
        'type' => 'article',
        'name' => 'Article',
      ]);
    $type->save();
    $this->container->get('router.builder')->rebuild();
  }

The above snippet is just an example. For your test, please replace the logic written above.

JavaScript testing using PHPUnit and Drupal

JavaScript testing using PHPUnit is very simple in Drupal if you have already done JavaScript testing using WebDriver and Selenium.

The tests will remain the same except for a few syntax changes that PHP can understand. Also, the tests written under this will be executed on a standard browser. To help you out with a few things, please use the following headings as a reference.

Setting up JavaScript tests

To set up the JavaScript tests, we need to use the FunctionalJavascript folder that needs to be created inside the test/src folder. This is typically inside the module tree.

Next, create the test file with the .php extension that will serve as the test case file.

In this file, when the tester creates a test, they must ensure they are extending the WebDriverTestBase class. Inside this, the tester can proceed to develop tests and logic. Make use of assertions discussed in the previous section of this Drupal testing guide to create meaningful tests.

Writing tests to find an element

One of the most common operations while writing a test case is finding an element so the tester can process its logic. In Selenium, we get a rich set of library functions to achieve this using various methods.

Here, you can refer to the following code for the same:

$page = $this->getSession()->getPage();

// Find the submit button labeled 'Submit'
$button = $page->findButton('Submit');

// Find the field with the name 'name'
$field = $page->findField('name[0][value]');

// Find links
$link = $page->findLink('Link text');

// Find using css
$element = $page->find('css', 'css selector');

Writing tests to check if an element exists

The following line of code can be used to check if an element exists or not. It is important to note that the testers should always start their operations on an element after discovering whether it exists.

$this->assertNotEmpty($field);

Writing tests to wait in JavaScript tests

Waiting is an essential operation in web applications these days. Many elements depend on AJAX, Lazy load, or any other element that takes time to load, etc. This makes a web page efficient as it loads the required elements at the start.

The following code will help wait for other elements while performing Drupal testing.

$page->waitFor(10,
      function() use ($type, $selector, $page) {
        return $page->find($type, $selector);
     });

For AJAX requests, use the following code.

$this->assertSession()->assertWaitOnAjaxRequest()

The following functions are available for waiting:

• ::waitForElement()
• ::waitForElementVisible()
• ::waitForButton()
• ::waitForLink()
• ::waitForField()
• ::waitForId()

Unit testing using PHPUnit in Drupal

The final type of testing that almost each of your testing sessions will involve is unit testing. We are discussing unit testing with the PHPUnit framework, which is supported in Drupal 8 and above.

To start the unit testing, first install the composer dependencies. This can be achieved by downloading it from their official website and running the composer install command.

Next, put the phpunit.xml file in the current directory. This file was introduced in the “What is PHPUnit” section above.

Now you can create the unit tests using assertions and annotations and run them on the Drupal web application.

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