Testing the 'Add user' and 'Edit account' forms in Drupal 8 with Behat

On a recent project, I needed to add some behavioral tests to cover the functionality of the Password Policy module. I seem to be a sucker for pain, because often I choose to test the things it seems there's no documentation on—like testing the functionality of the partially-Javascript-powered password fields on the user account forms.

In this case, I was presented with two challenges:

  • I needed to run one scenario where a user edits his/her own password, and must follow the site's configured password policy.
  • I needed to run another scenario where an admin creates a new user account, and must follow the site's configured password policy for the created user's password.

So I came up with the following scenarios:

@password
Feature: Password Policy
  In order to verify that password policies are working
  As a user
  I should not be able to use a password
  Unless it meets the minimum site password policy constraints

  @api @authenticated
  Scenario: Users must meet password policy constraints
    Given users:
    | name                 | status | uid    | mail                             | pass         |
    | test.password.policy |      1 | 999999 | [email protected] | fEzHZ3ru9pce |
    When I am logged in as user "test.password.policy"
    And I am on "/user/999999/edit"
    And I fill in "edit-current-pass" with "fEzHZ3ru9pce"
    And I fill in "edit-pass-pass1" with "abc123"
    And I fill in "edit-pass-pass2" with "abc123"
    And I press "edit-submit"
    Then I should see "The password does not satisfy the password policies."
    And I should see "Fail - Password length must be at least 12 characters."

  @api @authenticated @javascript
  Scenario: Password policy constraints are enforced when creating new users
    Given I am logged in as user "administrator_account"
    When I am on "/admin/people/create"
    And I fill in "mail" with "[email protected]"
    And I fill in "name" with "test.create.user"
    And I fill in "edit-pass-pass1" with "test.create.userABC123"
    And I fill in "edit-pass-pass2" with "test.create.userABC123"
    And I pause for "1" seconds
    And I press "edit-submit"
    Then I should see "The password does not satisfy the password policies."

Now, there are a couple annoying/special things I'm doing here:

  • For the first scenario, I had trouble making it work without specifying the uid of the new user, because I needed to get to the user edit page (user/[id]/edit), but for some reason trying a step like And I click "Edit" was not working for me.
  • The first scenario doesn't seem to have any trouble with the process of clicking submit then seeing the password policy validation error message—hold onto that thought for a second.
  • The second scenario uses @javascript to indicate this test should be run in a browser environment with javascript running. Apparently this means there is some tiny amount of delay between the time the 'edit-pass-passX' fields are filled in and the drupal password validation javascript does whatever it does—any time I would submit without a pause, I would get the error "The specified passwords do not match." Infuriating!

To resolve the third problem listed above, I added a custom step definition to my project's FeatureContext:

  /**
   * @When I pause for :seconds seconds
   */
  public function iPauseForSeconds($seconds) {
    sleep($seconds);
  }

And the way I finally figured out that it was a timing issue was because I stuck in a Behat breakpoint (e.g. And I break) in different points in the scenario, and found it would work if I paused between tasks.

Sometimes testing can be a bit infuriating :P

I'm guessing there are a few slightly-better ways to get this done, but it works for me, and a 1s pause two times in my test suite isn't so bad.

Further reading

drupal 8
drupal
behat
testing
drupal planet
featurecontext

Comments

Thanks for sharing your experience. I can confirm basically everything you're saying :)

To solve the problem of "how do I get to the uid page?" I've created custom steps like "And I am on the "edit" page for user with email". Internally, the context has to lead the user with that email (or username) and then navigate to the right page.

Pausing is a common solution to the javascript problem of waiting for JS to finish evaluating. This can be especially problematic on automated test runners you don't control (e.g. Travis or Probo) where the speed of the test machine can be impacted by other system users. I don't have a ton of experience with these, but some test runners seem to have an "I wait for AJAX to finish" that works well and sometimes it doesn't work so well. So, yes, adding pauses can often help.