Behat step-definition to verify visibility (not just presence) of Drupal form elements. post

In November 2013, I tried Drupal BDD using Behat and the Behat Drupal extension. The experiment was to apply BDD in order to implement a small feature on an existing site. After a informal discussion about the feature, the stakeholder wanting it wrote the Cucumber scenarios. As the developer of the feature, I took the scenarios and started by running them against my test site. And so, my BDD journey started.

The first thing that needed fixing was the scenario itself, off course being the first scenario ever written by its author, most of the step, while understandable by an human being did not match the pattern expected by Behat (actually the (Mink)[http://mink.behat.org/] and Drupal extensions). While fixing the steps, I quickly learned that steps to easily express the visibility of Drupal form element did not exists. So I wrote a couple or steps to check for the (in)visibility of form element identified by their labels. Writing the steps was the occasion to dig the Behat and Mink APIs. Most of them requires a (Mink driver)[http://mink.behat.org/#different-browsers-drivers] with support for CSS in order for the visibility tests on the form element to work. The Goutte driver does not, the Selenium driver does not. I don't known for others.

The code for these steps is distributed under a MIT-style licence as Gist (embed below). In (issue 2151935)[https://drupal.org/node/2151935] Another Behat/Drupal enthusiast requested for them to be included . This would require a bit more work as they currently heavily rely on, what I think is, the default Drupal form markup and have only been tested in single custom theme. Because we can expect everyone to use default form markup, the code to retrieve a form element or its label should abstracted to easily overwriteable methods. One of these methods should be used to retrieve the form labels on the page. Once you have a form label element, you can retrieve its form element using its for attribute (requiring this attribute is a reasonable requirements). Another method should be used to retrieve the type (ie. the Drupal form API #type) of a form element.