Passing data provider to setUp() in PHPUnit

Question

I'm currently trying to pass data from my data provider to the setUp()-method in PHPUnit.

Background: I am using PHPUnit for running frontend-tests in different browsers. The browser should be defined inside the data provider and needs to be known by the setUp()-method.

I understand, that a data provider initially is executed before the setUp()-method (as setUpBeforeClass()) is called. Therefore setUp()-data can not be passed to a data provider. But it should work the other way round, shouldn't it?

Does PHPUnit generate its own temporarily testclasses with data from the data provider "integrated"?

Of course: a workaround could be, to read the XML-file in the setUp()-method again. But that's the last option, I'd consider...

EDIT: Provided a small snippet:

part of dataProvider():

public function dataProvider()
{
    $this->xmlCnf = $data['config'];
    var_dump($this->xmlCnf); // array with config is exposed
    // [...]
}

And the setUp()-method:

 protected function setUp()
{
    var_dump($this->xmlCnf); // NULL
    //[...]
}

Answer 1

In case this is useful to anyone:

The following code should work:

public function dataProvider()
{
    return [ [ /* dataset 1 */] , ... ]
}

protected setUp() {
    parent::setUp();
    $arguments = $this->getProvidedData();
    // $arguments should match the provided arguments for this test case
}

/** 
 * @dataProvider dataProvider
 */
public function testCase(...$arguments) {

}

The getProvidedData method seems to have been available since PHPUnit 5.6 (which was either shortly before or after this question was originally asked)