PHPUnit with Selenium2 - share session not working - unit-testing

Question

I'm doing some tests with PHPUnit and Selenium and i would like all of them to run in the same browser window.
I've tried starting the Selenium Server with
java -jar c:\php\selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar -browserSessionReuse
but with no visible change.
I've also tried with shareSession() in the setup
public function setUp()
{
$this->setHost('localhost');
$this->setPort(4444);
$this->setBrowser('firefox');
$this->shareSession(true);
$this->setBrowserUrl('http://localhost/project');
}
but the only change is that it opens a window for every test, and not really sharing the session. I'm out of ideas at this point.
My tests look like this:
public function testHasLoginForm()
{
$this->url('');
$email = $this->byName('email');
$password = $this->byName('password');
$this->assertEquals('', $email->value());
$this->assertEquals('', $password->value());
}

Answer 1

Here's the elegant solution. To share browser sessions in Selenium2TestCase, you must set sessionStrategy => 'shared' in your initial browser setup:
public static $browsers = array(
array(
'...
'browserName' => 'iexplorer',
'sessionStrategy' => 'shared',
...
)
);
The alternative (default) is 'isolated'.

Answer 2

You do not need to use the flag -browserSessionReuse
In your case The set up function running before every test and starting new instance.
This is what i did to prevent this to happen (Its little bit ugly but work for me both in Windows and Ubuntu):
I created helper class with static ver: $first and initialized it.
helper.php:
<?php
class helper
{
public static $first;
}
helper::$first = 0;
?>
Edit main test file setUp() function(and add require_once to helper.php):
require_once "helper.php";
class mySeleniumTest extends PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase
{
public function setUp()
{
$this->setHost('localhost');
$this->setPort(4444);
if (helper::$first == 0 )
{
$this->shareSession(TRUE);
$this->setBrowser('firefox');
$this->setBrowserUrl('http://localhost/project');
helper::$first = 1 ;
}
}
....
setHost and setPort outside the if because the values restarted after each test(For me...) and need to set up every time (if the selenium server is not localhost:4444)

Answer 3

Just found an (much) faster way to proceed : If you perform several test in one function, all test are performed in the same window. The setback is that the tests and reporting won't be nicely presented by tests, but the speed is way up!
In the same function for each test just use:
$this->url('...');
Or
$this->back();