Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension simply we can say like selenium via FF plugin and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run. Selenium IDE is the easiest way to use Selenium and most of the time it also serves as a starting point for your automation. As compared to most of the test automation tools it is very simple and lightweight.

Advantages: 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.

Disadvantages: 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.

Features:

• Easy record and playback.
• Intelligent field selection will use IDs, names, or XPath as needed.
• Autocomplete for all common Selenium commands.
• Walk through tests.
• Debug and set breakpoints.
• Save tests as HTML, Ruby scripts, or any other format.
• Support for Selenium user-extensions.js file.
• Option to automatically assert the title of every page.

Selenium IDE installation: 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 (version: 1.5 or higher), it should get installed. If installed properly, Selenium can be accessed from tool --> Selenium IDE in your browser toolbar.

Selenium Toolbar contents and their functionality:The small red button on the right hand side gives you an indication on whether Selenium is in recording mode or not. By default when the IDE comes up it has recording turned on. You might want to turn it off by clicking on the red button, until you are ready to begin recording. Go to a web site that you want to record, click on the record button and begin your browsing task(s). You will notice that as you click and type in the browser the IDE is recording everything you are doing. 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. When you are done, simply end recording and click on the green arrow to play back your script you just created. Don't forget to save your script before closing the IDE.

If you are created script manually, simply go to the Source tab in the IDE and paste the script in there. Now go back to the Editor tab and click on the Green arrow button. You should now see the actions taking place in your Firefox browser. If you want to slow down the execution select the Walk radio button before playing the script. You may need to increase the pause commands if the web pages are not rendering fast enough, and thus causing an error.

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.

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.Here is a screen shot of Selenium IDE.