Commonly used selenium IDE commands

Selenium IDE provided the user with a rich set of commands for manipulating the application under test. As discussed previously these commands can be broadly classified into actions, accessors and assertions. Making use of these various selenese commands a user can perform various actions such as checking for the existence of various UI elements, check for links present, enter data into text fields, select from drop down lists, etc. Besides these they can also perform actions such as switch between windows, scroll through a page, test Ajax functionality and many other web application features.

We shall see in detail some of the most commonly used selenium commands.

Creating a manual selenium IDE script using firebug

The easiest way for a user to create a test case using the selenium IDE is the record and playback mode. One could record the entire flow with assertions and verifications in between to create the test case. But if one is to move on to learning up the more advanced selenium tools such as selenium RC or web driver, it would be a good practise to manually create the selenium IDE scripts.

For demonstrating this we shall use the http://newtours.demoaut.com/ site to create the IDE script. We shall create a selenese script for a user to login.

What is Selenese?

Selenese is a special test scripting language used by selenium for creating test cases. It a cross platform language used for representing the selenium commands. These are also referred to as selenese commands. Test scripts are created by writing these commands in proper sequence.

Making use of the various selenese commands a user can perform various actions such as checking for the existence of various UI elements, check for links present, enter data into text fields, select from drop down lists, etc. Besides these they can also perform actions such as switch between windows, scroll through a page, test Ajax functionality and many other web application features.