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Selenium IDE
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Selenium Core
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Selenium Remote Control
In this
article, we will discuss
Selenium IDE.
Subsequent articles in the
series will cover Selenium
Remote Control and Selenium
Core as well.
Selenium
IDE
Selenium
IDE is the easiest
way to use Selenium and most
of the
time it also serves as a
starting point for your
automation. Selenium IDE comes
as an extension to the
Firefox web
browser. This can be
installed from either openqa
or mozilla
distribution site. Selenium
extension will be
downloaded as XPI file. If you open
this file using File -> open
in Mozilla, it
should get installed.
Biggest drawback of Selenium
IDE is its
limitation in terms of
browser support. Though
Selenium scripts can be used
for most of the browser and
operating system, Scripts
written using Selenium
IDE can be used for only
Firefox browser if it is not
used with Selenium RC or
Selenium Core.
Selenium IDE is the only
flavor of Selenium
which allows you to record
user action on browser
window. It can also
record user actions in most
of the popular
languages like Java, C#, Perl,
Ruby etc. This eliminates
the need of learning new
vendor scripting
language.
For executing
scripts created in these
languages, you will
need to use Selenium Remote
Control. If you do not want
to use Remote
Control than you will need
to create your test scripts
in HTML format.
So if you
are excited about the tool,
Lets start playing with
Selenium IDE now. If
installed properly, Selenium
can be accessed from tool
--> Selenium IDE in your browser toolbar.
As compared
to most of the test
automation tools it is very
simple and lightweight. The small red
button on the right hand
side gives you an
indication on
whether Selenium is in
recording mode or not. Also,
Selenium IDE will
not record any operation
that you do on your computer apart from the
events on Firefox browser window.
So go
ahead read your
mail, open a word doc or do
anything else, Selenium will
record only your
actions on browser.
If you
are curious to know about
other options
present on the Selenium IDE, there
are not much :) . Other options
present on the
Selenium IDE toolbar are
related to test execution.
Run will execute
the tests with the maximum
possible speed, Walk will
execute them with relatively
slow speed and in step mode you
will need to tell Selenium
to take small
steps.
Final button present on the
Selenium IDE toolbar is the
Selenium TestRunner. Test Runner gives you nice
browser interface to
execute your tests
and also gives summary
of how many tests were
executed, how many
passed and failed. It also
gives similar information on commands which
were passed or failed.
TestRunner is also
available to tests
developed in HTML Only.
If you open the
option window by going
to Option , you will see
there are some self
explanatory options
available. For example,
encoding of test files,
timeout etc. You can
also specify Selenium Core
and Selenium IDE extensions
on this page.
Selenium extensions can be
used to enhance the
functionality provided by
Selenium. Selenium
extensions are not
covered in this article,
there will be a
separate article for
specifying and developing
extensions for
Selenium.
Selenium IDE Commands &
Steps >>>
