Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for performing Selenium tests. Selenium tests can be written as HTML tables or coded in various languages like C#, PHP, Perl, Python and can be run directly in most modern browsers.The IDE can help you to record, edit and debug tests. Currently the IDE is only available for Firefox (as if we developers will use any other) as a addon.

In this selenium IDE tutorial, I want to go over what I covered in my previous article on Selenium IDE and in my interview with Dave Haefner one of the folks working on the new Selenium IDE at Applitools. How to Install Selenium IDE. First, you need to do is install Selenium IDE. Selenium Tutorial with Introduction, features, selenium basic terminology, what is selenium, selenium limitations, selenium vs qtp, tool suite, selenium ide, ide-installation, ide-features, ide-first test case, ide-commands, ide-creating test cases manually, ide-login test etc. Selenium IDE tutorial for php programmers. Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for performing Selenium tests. Selenium tests can be written as HTML tables or coded in various languages like C#, PHP, Perl, Python and can be run directly in most modern browsers.The IDE can help you to record, edit and debug tests. Let’s discuss Selenium testing tutorial first, then we will jump to Selenium WebDriver Tutorial later. Selenium Tutorial Guide for Beginners Selenium is available in two popular forms – First is Selenium IDE and the other is Selenium WebDriver. Selenium IDE is a platform that aids in producing test scripts to automate the testing process.

Selenium Ide Tutorial For Beginners

Here is a possible scenario for using Selenium. Imagine you have created a HTML form with about twenty fields and you have to repeatedly test the form. Filling the form every time can quickly become tedious. With Selenium you can automate the whole process and run the test as required. In this part we will see how to create a simple test in Selenium. So let’s get started.
STEP 1 – installation :

You can download Selenium IDE from this locations.
http://selenium-ide.openqa.org/download.jsp
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2079
Once the addon is installed make sure you do not forget to restart Firefox.

STEP 2 – running a simple test :

a. Start Selenium IDE in Firefox: Tools->Selenium IDE. You will see the following popup.

b. Click on the red record button on the right.
c. Browse to Google.com and enter ‘selenium’ in the search box and click enter.
d. Click on the first result, which is that of selenium.openqa.org.
e. Stop the recording by clicking on the record button.

You should see something like below. If you click on the ‘ Source’ tab you can see the test html generated by selenium.

The ‘table’ tab shows the commands recorded by Selenium.

f. Open a new tab in Firefox and click on the Selenium IDE’s play button to run the recorded test.

The IDE should play your recorded test. After the test is complete you should have landed on the selenium page (http://selenium.openqa.org/). The IDE after the test run is shown below. In the ‘Log section’ you can see the various events run by the test. In the table tab you can see that all the rows are green, which means that the test ran successfully.

Now lets add a small assertion to the above test.

a. Click on the blank line below after the last ‘clickAndWait’ command and insert ‘assertTextPresent’ command from the drop down box as shown below. You should see something like this.

This test checks to see if the text ‘Selenium News’ is present in the last rendered page. Run the test again and you should see that the test has run successfully. No try replacing the text with something that is not present on the page, take for example ‘elvis’ and run the test again. Now the test fails and you should get the screen below.

You have just completed your first test run. And it was so simple.

‘assertTextPresent’ is one of the hundreds of commands available for your testing needs. Just browse throught the command drop down to get a feel of what you can you get.

In the next part we will see more advanced features of Selenium.

In this selenium IDE tutorial, I want to go over what I covered in my previous article on Selenium IDE and in my interview with Dave Haefner one of the folks working on the new Selenium IDE at Applitools.

How to Install Selenium IDE

First, you need to do is install Selenium IDE.

Selenium IDE is a browser extension. Currently, both Chrome and Firefox are supported.

So if you used Selenium IDE in the past the new version supports not only Firefox but also Chrome.

To Install Selenium IDE in Chrome

To install in Chrome just click on ‘Add to Chrome‘ and then click on Add Extension.

Once IDE is installed you'll see an icon in your browser toolbar.

Click on that icon it will bring up Selenium IDE.

Create Your First Selenium IDE Automation Test

Next, let's create our very first test and project in Selenium IDE.

When you start up you have an option to either create a new project or open an existing project.

Let's create a new one. Call it JoeDemo.

The base URL is the URL your going to use for your test. For this example enter: https://testguild.com/SeleniumTestPage.html.

This will bring up the application under tests.

You'll know that it's recording because in the bottom right you'll see a “Selenium IDE is Recording” message.

So as you interact with your application behind the scenes Selenium IDE is recording your actions.

Also with the new Selenium IDE, you can also right click on your application and you'll have a new menu item called Selenium IDE.

This is where you can to your verifications and assertions and also you can store values as variables and use them later which will check in a moment.

Next, give the test a name JoeTest1

The Selenium IDE Interface Tour

Let's take a look at what the new Selenium IDE looks like and what it just did as we were recording our tests.

The first thing I normally do when I start using a new tool is I just get familiar with the all the menu option in the tools IDE.

Now let's just look at the different areas within Selenium IDE and then we'll take a deeper look into what Selenium IDE actually recorded and how we can modify our script and run it and play it back.

So there are different areas within the IDE that I like to break things down into.

Selenium Run Command

The first section is the Run area.

The first run option is Run All test. So if you have multiple tests you can run your whole test suite in Selenium IDE by using this option.

You also have the Run Current Tests. So, of course, this is self-explanatory but Run Current tests would be used to run the current test.

The other control I also include within the Run commands is the Test Execution Speed. This controls how fast you want the test to run. A lot of times a good practice is to just to not always do it as fast as possible. Many times when you run your test there's sometimes network latency, little hiccups in the network that cause time variations. So to handle that sometimes you wanna run your test not as fast as it can be, but maybe just a little bit slower than normal.

Selenium IDE Debug Controls

So the next set of controls I like to call the Debugging Controls.

The first one is the Step option. This allows you to step over your test case by running each command one at a time. It's really helpful when you're debugging to go step by step and look exactly what's happening at each point within your test. It's really excellent for hard to find issues that you may not know just by running the tests and looking at the results.

Another debug option is the BreakPoint feature. Breakpoints are really cool because they allow you to stop at a particular line of code in your test script. This is really handy to have if you have a very long script that is failing, say near the end of the test run.

Basically, you can do as you can pause the running to see what state your application is in before you get to that point and then you can then use this in conjunction with your step control to step from that point on to really pinpoint what's happening in your test at a given point in time.

You also have a Pause on Exception option. using this will cause the debugger to pause before a red message appears in the console or in your log. So you get to inspect what's happening before things go wrong.

Selenium Test Control Panel

The next section is the Test Control Panel area. This contains a command, a target, value, and a description.

• The command is the action to perform against an element within your application.
• The target is the value to use to identify your element.
• The value is then the value to insert in your element. Not all elements need a value but if they do this way you would enter into.
• The description allows you to really name your step in the human-readable format and a description that makes it really easy for anyone to understand when they're looking at your particular script.

IDE Console Options

The last major options are the selenium Console options. This contains a Log and a Reference tab.

• A Log is a step by step the results of your test.
• For the Reference tab if you click on any step within your test and you go to reference it'll explain what that command is doing. So it's really helpful to get the information about the command that's currently highlighted with the new test to get a little more information on what exactly it is and what the arguments are that it expects.

So now that we understand the different sections within Selenium IDE let's run our test and see the results.

Run and Modify Your First IDE Selenium Test

If you look at the log file that we mentioned earlier, it will show you step by step what's happening along the way and what the result was.

Another option within Selenium IDE is you can modify your test. So to modify a test if you right click you get another Selenium IDE drop-down and that gives you different options you can perform. So you can delete lines, you can insert lines, you can add a breakpoint, and you can execute a command.

So let's add a new line of code and see how we can modify our test.

Highlight the line where you want to enter in your new line. Right click and click on insert new commands.

The new command to enter is actually a new feature within Selenium IDE that's really cool. And that's the ability to add conditional logic within your test script. So things like IF Else statements, Do statements, timer's, while loops things that you're probably very familiar with if you're used to programming.

How to Create a Variable in Selenium IDE

The first thing I want to do is I want to store the text that's returned to me when we select its operating system in our example.

In the Command field select Store Value.

In the Target which is the locator used to identify the particular element enter name=about.

Next, create a variable called myOS.

Enter a new line and enter the Echo command. Echo is pretty much like a print statement. So to print the value of myOS that was captured, enter ${myOS}.

So how this works is that it is going to go to the operating system field. It's going to grab the text that appears. It's going to store it in a variable called myOS and then it's going to print that out to the log file.

Run the tests look at the Log and you will see the value of the operating system you are running on. In my example the value is Macintosh.

How to Add Control Logic in Selenium IDE

Now let's add one of those new selenium ide flow control logic features that we talked about earlier. So we're just going to add a simple IF statement. Just to get a handle for not only capturing a variable but then making decisions on it later on which is a very common activity you'll need to do as you create more and more complicated automated tests.

Add another line.

Under Command add IF. If you don't know what the IF commander is, just go to reference and it will tell you exactly what the IF command is for.

For the target enter: ${myOS} ”Macintosh”.

Add another line and in the Command enter Echo and in Target add Steve Jobs.

Add another line to close out the IF statement. To close an IF statement enter the Command value End statement. If you can see it within the reference a statement just basically terminates that control flow.

Run the test and see what happens.

As you can see it created a variable, it held onto the value of Macintosh, since the value did equal Macintosh it did print out Steve Jobs.

So you can create more complicated conditional statements so we could have added on an Else If statement to say if it equals windows then print Bill Gates. So if someone took this script and ran it on a Windows machine it would have printed out Bill Gates.

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How To Install and Run IDE Test Using Selenium IDE Runner

The last feature I want to show you is awesome for running test in a continuous integration continuous delivery system. So let's install it.

Go to: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium-ide/tree/master/packages/selenium-side-runner

Run the install NPM command: npm install -g selenium-side-runner (I assume you already have Node.js installed on your system since you will need it for this to work).

Open up a terminal/command line window and run the demo script: For this example the command would be selenium-side-runner JoeDemo.side

Notice how the test passed.

As I mentioned is really useful when you're running in CI/CD, if you just want to create a quick and dirty test and just run it say Jenkins. Because you can run it from a command line it's very easy to use in that type of environment.

Two New Feature that Will Blow Your Selenium Mind.

Here are two of the biggest features in the new Selenium ID that's going to change your automation efforts in a big way. I don't think I'm not overstating it. When you see these two changes I think your mind is going to be blown.

Automatic Fallback Locators

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The first one is the automatic Locator element selector functionality that's been added to the new Selenium IDE.

When you record with IDE not only does a record what it thinks is the main identifier for your element. It also automatically records all the other ways it can use to identify that element.

And the reason why that's huge is a lot of times you may have a developer that changes the name or the ID but doesn't go back into the actual automation code and change it. So when your test runs or fails. It's a maintenance nightmare to have to go in and make that change.

Even if your using page objects you still need to go in and make the change.

What's really cool about the new Selenium IDE is that if it doesn't find the preferred locator it will go through all the other locators automatically to find that element.

So that's going to save you a a lot of time with maintenance and make your tests a lot more reliable. So that's a huge, huge feature that's going to be a game changer.

Automatic Waits

So the second change is what I call the number one killer of selenium script performance reliability, and that is synchronization.

Many times people will create a test and not add any type of synchronization to say before I interact with this element, is it available, is it visible? They just automatically made assumptions and just went on to try to perform a step on that element.

So a lot of times the test will just fail randomly because that element sometimes appears within a certain time and sometimes a doesn't. You have to then try to find what's the best synchronization method to use to make your test more reliable.

So there are explicit waits and implicit waits and all these different ways that you can actually use to synchronize your test to make sure before and interact with an element that it's available to be interacted with.

With the new Selenium IDE, you don't have to worry about that any longer!

It now will automatically add those waits for you. Without you having to do anything. So you record your script and when you play it back it automatically knows what to wait for. So it automatically adds those synchronization points for you automatically behind the scenes.

So two killer features and honestly the two biggest ones that tend to cause your test to be unreliable and hard to maintain have been addressed in this new Selenium IDE.

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Check it out. Tell me what you think. Let me know how it works for you.