Selenium Basics Part - 3

Selenium Commands – Selenese

A command is what tells Selenium what to do. Selenium commands come in three “flavors”:Actions, Accessors and Assertions.

• Actions are commands that generally manipulate the state of the application. They do things like “click this link” and “select that option”. If an Action fails, or has an error, the execution of the current test is stopped.

Many Actions can be called with the “AndWait” suffix, e.g. “clickAndWait”. This suffix tells Selenium that the action will cause the browser to make a call to the server, and that Selenium should wait for a new page to load.

• Accessors examine the state of the application and store the results in variables, e.g. “storeTitle”. They are also used to automatically generate Assertions.
• Assertions are like Accessors, but they verify that the state of the application conforms to what is expected. Examples include “make sure the page title is X” and “verify that this checkbox is checked”.

Script Syntax

Selenium commands are simple, they consist of the command and two parameters. For example:

verifyText

//div//a[2]

Login

The parameters are not always required; it depends on the command. In some cases both are required, in others one parameter is required, and in still others the command may take no parameters at all. Here are a couple more examples:

goBackAndWait
verifyTextPresent		Welcome to My Home Page
type	id=phone	(555) 666-7066
type	id=address1	${myVariableAddress}

The command reference describes the parameter requirements for each command.

Parameters vary, however they are typically:

• a locator for identifying a UI element within a page.
• a text pattern for verifying or asserting expected page content

a text pattern or a selenium variable for entering text in an input field or for selecting an option from an option list.

Test Suites

A test suite is a collection of tests. Often one will run all the tests in a test suite as one continuous batch-job.

When using Selenium-IDE, test suites also can be defined using a simple HTML file. The syntax again is simple. An HTML table defines a list of tests where each row defines the filesystem path to each test. An example tells it all.

Test Suite Function Tests - Priority 1

A file similar to this would allow running the tests all at once, one after another, from the Selenium-IDE.

Test suites can also be maintained when using Selenium-RC. This is done via programming and can be done a number of ways. Commonly Junit is used to maintain a test suite if one is using Selenium-RC with Java. Additionally, if C# is the chosen language, Nunit could be employed. If using an interpreted language like Python with Selenium-RC than some simple programming would be involved in setting up a test suite. Since the whole reason for using Sel-RC is to make use of programming logic for your testing this usually isn’t a problem.

Commonly Used Selenium Commands

To conclude our introduction of Selenium, we’ll show you a few typical Selenium commands. These are probably the most commonly used commands for building tests.

open

opens a page using a URL.

click/clickAndWait

performs a click operation, and optionally waits for a new page to load.

verifyTitle/assertTitle

verifies an expected page title.

verifyTextPresent

verifies expected text is somewhere on the page.

verifyElementPresent

verifies an expected UI element, as defined by its HTML tag, is present on the page.

verifyText

verifies expected text and it’s corresponding HTML tag are present on the page.

verifyTable

verifies a table’s expected contents.

waitForPageToLoad

pauses execution until an expected new page loads. Called automatically when clickAndWait is used.

waitForElementPresent

pauses execution until an expected UI element, as defined by its HTML tag, is present on the page.

Summary

Now that you’ve seen an introduction to Selenium, you’re ready to start writing your first scripts. We recommend beginning with the Selenium IDE and its context-sensitive, right-click, menu. This will allow you to get familiar with the most common Selenium commands quickly, and you can have a simple script done in just a minute or two. 

Locating Elements

For many Selenium commands, a target is required. This target identifies an element in the content of the web application, and consists of the location strategy followed by the location in the format locatorType=location. The locator type can be omitted in many cases. The various locator types are explained below with examples for each

Locating by Id

Locating by Name

Locating by XPath

Locating Hyperlinks by Link Text

Locating by DOM

Locating by CSS

Store commands

storeElementPresent

This corresponds to verifyElementPresent. It simply stores a boolean value–”true” or “false”–depending on whether the UI element is found.

storeText

StoreText corresponds to verifyText. It uses a locater to identify specific page text. The text, if found, is stored in the variable. StoreText can be used to extract text from the page being tested.

storeEval

This command takes a script as its first parameter. Embedding JavaScript within Selenese is covered in the next section. StoreEval allows the test to store the result of running the script in a variable.