What is the difference in setBrowserUrl() and url() in Selenium 2 web driver for phpunit?

Question

In many examples, I have seen calls made to both webdriver->setBrowserURL(url) and webdriver->url(url). Why would I want to use one instead of the other. One such example shows using both in the same manner (taken from the phpunit manual):

<?php
class WebTest extends PHPUnit_Extensions_Selenium2TestCase
{
    protected function setUp()
    {
        $this->setBrowser('firefox');
        $this->setBrowserUrl('http://www.example.com/');
    }

    public function testTitle()
    {
        $this->url('http://www.example.com/');
        $this->assertEquals('Example WWW Page', $this->title());
    }

}
?>

Why would setBrowserUrl() be called once in setup -- and then url() be called with the identical url in the test case itself?

In other examples, I've seen url() called with just a path for the url. What is the proper usage here? I can find almost no documentation on the use of url().

Answer 1

setBrowserUrl() sets a base url, allowing you to use relative paths in your tests.

The example from the phpunit manual is kind of confusing - I believe setBrowserUrl() is being used during setup simply because it'll throw an error without it:

public function start()
{
    if ($this->browserUrl == NULL) {
        throw new PHPUnit_Framework_Exception(
          'setBrowserUrl() needs to be called before start().'
        );
    }

$this->url will use this base if a relative path is given.