What do you get with Print?

Instant access to your digital copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

Redeem a companion digital copy on all Print orders

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

Learning Selenium Testing Tools - Third Edition

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Selenium IDE

Test automation has grown in popularity over the years because developers do not have the time or money to invest in large test teams to make sure that applications work as they are expected. Developers also want to make sure that the code they have created works as they expect it to.

Jason Huggins saw this issue too and wanted to make sure that any system he was working on would work on multiple operating systems and browsers. So he created Selenium.

Selenium IDE is a fully-featured IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that installs as a plugin in Mozilla Firefox and enables developers to test their web applications through Selenium. With the Selenium IDE, you can record user interactions with the web browser and play them back to test for errors. It's a powerful, robust IDE that radically simplifies and automates the QA testing process.

Selenium is one of the most well-known testing frameworks in the world that is in use. It is an open source project that allows testers and developers alike to develop functional tests to drive the browser. It can be used to record workflows so that it reduces the time in regression testing. Selenium can work on any browser that supports JavaScript, since Selenium has been built using JavaScript.

In this chapter, you will learn the basics of the Selenium IDE, how to use it, and how to locate a web element on a web page. We shall cover the following topics:

What is Selenium IDE
Recording our first test
Updating tests to work with AJAX sites
Using variables in our tests
Debugging tests
Saving tests to be used later
Creating and saving test suites

Note

So, let's get on with it...

Before we start working through this chapter, we need to make sure that Mozilla Firefox is installed on your machine. If you do not have Mozilla Firefox installed, you will need to download it from http://www.getfirefox.com/.

Understanding Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is a Firefox add-on developed originally by Shinya Kasatani as a way to use the original Selenium Core code without having to copy Selenium Core onto the server. Selenium Core is the key JavaScript module that allows Selenium to drive the browser. It has been developed using JavaScript so that it can interact with DOM (Document Object Model) using native JavaScript calls.

Selenium IDE was developed to allow testers and developers to record their actions as they follow the workflow that they need to test.

Installing Selenium IDE

Now that we understand what Selenium IDE is, it is a good time to install it. At the end of these steps, you will have successfully installed Selenium IDE onto your computer:

Go to http://seleniumhq.org/download/.
Click on the download link for Selenium IDE. You may see a message appear saying Firefox prevented this site (seleniumhq.org) from asking you to install software on your computer. If you do, click the Allow button.
A Firefox prompt will appear, as shown in the following screenshot:
You will then be asked if you would like to install Selenium IDE and the exporter add-ons. These have been made pluggable to the IDE by the work that Adam Goucher did. You will see a screenshot similar to the following one:
Click on Install button. This will now install Selenium IDE and formatters as Firefox add-ons.
Once the installation process is complete, it will ask you to restart Firefox. Click the Restart Now button. Firefox will close and then reopen. If you have anything open in another browser, it might be worth saving your work as Firefox will try to go back to its original state. However, this cannot be guaranteed.
Once the installation is complete, the add-ons window will show the Selenium IDE and its current version:

You have successfully installed Selenium IDE and we can start thinking about writing our first test.

Getting acquainted with the Selenium IDE tool

Now that Selenium IDE has been installed, let's take some time to familiarize ourselves with it. This will give us the foundation that we can use in later chapters. Open up Selenium IDE by going through the tools menu in Mozilla Firefox. Navigate to Tools | Selenium IDE. A window will appear. If the menu bar is not available, which is now the default in Firefox, you can launch Selenium IDE via Firefox | Web Developer | Selenium IDE.

Starting from the top, I will explain what each of the items are:

Base URL: This is the URL that the test will start at. All open commands will be relative to Base URL unless a full path is inserted in the open command.
Speed Slider: This is the slider under the Fast and Slow labels in the screenshot.
: This play entire test suite icon runs all the tests in the IDE.
: This play current test case icon runs a single test in the IDE.
: This pause/resume icon pauses a test that is currently running.
: This step icon steps through the test once it has paused.
: This is the record button. This will be engaged when the test is recording.
The Command drop-down list has a list of all the commands that are needed to create a test. You can type into it to use the autocomplete functionality or use it as a dropdown.
The Target textbox allows you to input the location of the element that you want to work against.
The Find button, once the target box is populated, can be clicked to highlight the element on the page.
The Value textbox is where you place the value that needs to change. For example, if you want your test to type in an input box on the web page, you will put what you want it to type in the value box.
The Table tab will keep track of all your commands, targets, and values. It has been structured this way because the original version of Selenium was styled on FIT tests. FIT (Framework for Integrated Testing) was created by Ward Cunningham. The tests were originally designed to be run from HTML files and the IDE keeps this idea for its tests.
If you click the Source tab, you will be able to see the HTML that will store the test. Each of the rows will look like this:
```
  <tr>
    <td>open</td>
    <td>/chapter1</td>
    <td></td>
  </tr>
```
The area below the Value textbox will show the Selenium log while the tests are running. If an item fails, then it will have an [error] entry. This area will also show help on Selenium commands when you are working in the Command drop-down list. This can be extremely useful when typing commands into Selenium IDE instead of using the record feature.
The Log tab will show a log of what is happening during the test. The Reference tab gives you documentation on the command that you have highlighted, and is also useful if you forgot some command; users can just start writing command in the Command field, then select some like searched and read the reference.

Validating a test with assert and verify

In the last few steps, we were able to record a workflow that we would expect the user to perform. It will test that the relevant bit of functionality is there, such as buttons and links to work against. Unfortunately, we are not checking whether the other items on the page are there or if they are visible when they should be hidden. We will now work against the same page as before, but we shall make sure that different items are on the page.

There are two mechanisms for validating elements available on the application under test. The first is assert: this allows the test to check whether the element is on the page. If it is not available, then the test will stop on the step that failed. The second is verify: this allows the test to check if the element is on the page, but if it isn't, then the test will carry on execution. To add the assert or verify commands to the tests, we need to use the context menu that Selenium IDE adds to Firefox. All that one needs to do is right-click on the element if on Windows or Linux. If you have a Mac, then you will need to do the two-finger click to show the context menu.

When the context menu appears, it will look roughly like the following screenshot with the normal Firefox functions above it:

Validating a test with assert and verify

We will record the test and learn how to use/verify some commands as follows:

Open the IDE so that we can start recording.
Navigate to http://book.theautomatedtester.co.uk/chapter1.
Select Selenium Grid from the drop-down box.
Change the selection to Selenium Grid.
Verify that the Assert that this text is on the page text is mentioned on the right-hand side of the drop-down box, by right-clicking on the text and selecting verifyText id=diveontheleft Assert that this text is on the page. You can see the command in the previous screenshot.
Verify that the button is on the page. You will need to add a new command for verifyElementPresent with the verifybutton target in Selenium IDE.
Now that you have completed the previous steps, your Selenium IDE should look like the following screenshot:

If you now run the test, you will see it has verified that what you are expecting to see on the page has appeared. Notice that the verify commands have a darker green color. This is to show that they are more important to the test than moving through the steps. The test has now checked that the text we required is on the page and that the button is there too.

What will happen if the verify command did not find what it was expecting? The IDE would have thrown an error stating what was expected was not there, but then carried on with the rest of the test. We can see an example of this in the following screenshot:

The test would not have carried on if it was using assert as the mechanism for validating that the elements and text were loaded with the page.

We have just seen that we can add asserts or verification to the page. Selenium IDE does not do this when recording, so it will always be a manual step. The assert command will stop the running tests, unlike the verify command in which the tests will continue running even after failure. In both the cases, Selenium IDE will log an error. Each of these have their own merits.

Some of the verify and assert methods are as follows:

Selenium Command	Command Description
`verifyElementPresent`	This verifies an expected element is present on the page.
`assertElementPresent`	This asserts an expected element is present on the page.
`verifyElementNotPresent`	This verifies an expected element is not present on the page.
`assertElementNotPresent`	This asserts an expected element is not present on the page.
`verifyText`	This verifies expected text and its corresponding HTML tags are present on the page.
`assertText`	This asserts expected text and its corresponding HTML tags are present on the page.
`verifyAttribute`	This verifies the value of an attribute of any HTML tag on the page.
`assertAttribute`	This asserts the value of an attribute of any HTML tag on the page.
`verifyChecked`	This verifies whether the condition of the checkbox is checked or not on the page.
`assertChecked`	This asserts whether the condition of the checkbox is checked or not on the page.
`verifyAlert`	This verifies the alert present on the page.
`assertAlert`	This asserts the alert present on the page.
`verifyTitle`	This verifies an expected page title.
`assertTitle`	This asserts an expected page title.

What you will learn

Understand designing and implementing the automation framework

Understand and implement AJAX in your web pages

Set up Selenium WebDriver in both IntelliJ and Eclipse

Build test suites in Selenium using PageObjects

Get to know about WebElement handling with Selenium WebDriver

Install Selenium WebDriver for mobile devices

Understand and learn testing in Selenium Grid

What do you get with Print?

Instant access to your digital copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

Redeem a companion digital copy on all Print orders

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

Frequently bought together

€24.99

Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

€26.99

Learning Selenium Testing Tools - Third Edition

€36.99

Total € 88.97

Filter reviews by

All

Amazon verified reviews

Amazon Customer Feb 19, 2016

Clearly written with good examples. Was able to get going quickly.

Amazon Verified review

Bhushan Jun 03, 2015

Perfect book for fresher’s and new learnerWell summarized each and every feature

Naveen Bharadwaj May 22, 2015

I just started my career in automation team and selenium was a complete rocket science for me. The book authored by Raghavendra Prasad MG has been a great guide to me the whole time. Things are explained from scratch and any person who knows or understands English can learn selenium if he/she practices what's given in the book. Of-course, the person reading the book must have that interest or the need to learn selenium. To finalize, this is an extremely well written book with screenshots at every stage explaining how to go about with things. The book is a very good deal for the price it is being sold at, because what one can make after learning selenium is no-where close to the cost at what the book is sold.

Mike Ludemann Jul 18, 2019

Alle wichtigen Information und mehr sind vorhanden.

buya Jun 28, 2019

Ich habe gleich zwei Bücher gekauft für die Automatiserung mit dem Selenium Framework.Dieses Buch bietet einen guten Leitfaden.Im Vergleich zu dem anderen Buch welches ich mir auch über Amazon erworben habe, ist dieses Buch besser in der Praxis einsetzbar. Ich habe dieses Buch als Grundlage für das Selbstudium gekauft und bin recht zufrieden damit.

Learning Selenium Testing Tools - Third Edition: Leverage the power of Selenium to build your own real-time test cases from scratch , Third Edition

What do you get with Print?

Learning Selenium Testing Tools - Third Edition

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Selenium IDE

Note

Understanding Selenium IDE

Installing Selenium IDE

Getting acquainted with the Selenium IDE tool

Rules in creating tests with Selenium IDE

Recording your first test with Selenium IDE

Validating a test with assert and verify

Page 1 of 16

Description

Who is this book for?

What you will learn

Product Details

What do you get with Print?

Product Details

Frequently bought together

Table of Contents

Recommendations for you

Customer reviews

Filter reviews by

People who bought this also bought

About the author

FAQs

Learning Selenium Testing Tools - Third Edition: Leverage the power of Selenium to build your own real-time test cases from scratch , Third Edition

What do you get with Print?

Contact Details

Shipping Address

Billing Address

Installing Selenium IDE

Getting acquainted with the Selenium IDE tool

Description

Who is this book for?

What you will learn

Product Details

What do you get with Print?

Contact Details

Shipping Address

Billing Address

Product Details

Packt Subscriptions

Frequently bought together

Table of Contents

Recommendations for you

Customer reviews

Filter reviews by

People who bought this also bought

About the author

FAQs