This is second article in the series of articles for Selenium and will give step-by-step guide to get started with Selenium IDE. This will also explain the notion of commands in Selenium and how they work.

Another tab in the Selenium Options window is Format, As mentioned earlier, Selenium IDE can generate code in variety of languages, this page gives you an option of specifying what kind of formatting you would like in the generated code. For example, what should be the header, how it should be indented etc.

Lets start some action now, In the options, select format and specify HTML as your language choice for your automation. Notice that, when you select HTML as your choice of language, additional tab appears on the Selenium IDE called Table.

There are three columns under this Table - Command, Target and Value. This Table is the crux of how Selenium works. For any element present on the browser, Selenium maps its action in command, target and value. For example, if you want to type user name in the user name text box Selenium would translate it as command=type , Target=username text box and value=your username

For commands related to asserts, value can be used to compare the value. For example

command=assertText ,Target=Label and Value=somethingtocompare.

In this case Selenium will compare value of the target with the specified value in subsequent execution. Selenium gives you enough functionality in terms of identifying Target. You can locate or identify target using DOM, ID, Name, XPath etc. This helps you in making a robust automation framework. You might find it useful to try Firefox extensions like DOM Inspector or XPath Viewer to get information about the XPath or DOM information of the GUI element under test.

This information should be sufficient for you to explore Selenium IDE and get started with the tool. Lets summarize all the steps involved -

• Make sure you have installed Selenium IDE in Firefox.
• Open Firefox and application you want to test
• Launch Selenium IDE using tools-Selenium IDE
• By default, you should be in the recording mode, but confirm it by observing the Red button.
• Select HTML Format.
• Record some actions and make sure that these are coming on Selenium IDE.
• During recording if you right click on any element it will show all the selenium commands available.
• You can also edit existing command, by selecting it and editing on the boxes available.
• You can also insert/delete commands by choosing appropriate option after right clicking.
• Choose appropriate run option - i.e walk, run or test runner and review your results.

Hope this article was helpful for you in next article we will discuss how Selenium IDE can be used with Selenium Remote Control to write scripts in different languages.