Can't identify Selenium requests in CakePHP 2.6 - cakephp

Question

I have a problem using CakePHP with PHPUnit and Selenium and it is being INCREDIBLY difficult finding any help in the internet. I simply can't figure out how to identify in CakePHP that a request came from my Selenium agent, so that I can set the connection and database environment accordingly.
Any help would be highly appreciated! Further information regarding the best way to set my CakePHP app's database environment when requests come from Selenium are also most welcome.

Answer 1

The first step would be to set the user agent in Selenium to something your app would recognize as special. See the Selenium WebDriver Documentation.
Then in CakePHP you can use the global function env() to test the HTTP_USER_AGENT value. env is a wrapper for checking environment variables like $_SERVER.
For example in your database.php file:
var $default = array(
'datasource' => 'Database/Mysql',
'persistent' => false,
'host' => 'localhost',
'login' => 'user',
'password' => '****',
'database' => 'production_db',
'prefix' => ''
);
function __construct() {
// set database connection settings for testing environment
if (stristr(env('HTTP_USER_AGENT'), 'selenium') {
$this->default['database'] = 'test_db';
}
}
If you can't set the user agent with Selenium, perhaps you could pass a get variable with the URL.
Example using Selenium extension for PHPUnit:
$this->setBrowserUrl('http://www.example.com?selenium=true');
In CakePHP you would access the variable in the $_GET array.