Appendixes:

00_Note_to-the-reader.jsp

Note to the Reader - Docs Being Revised for Selenium 2.0!¶

Hello, and welcome! The Documentation Team would like to welcome you, and to thank you for being interested in Selenium.

We are currently updating this document for the Selenium 2.0 release. This means we are currently writing and editing new material, and revising old material. While reading, you may experience typos or other minor errors. If so, please be patient with us. Rather than withholding information until it’s finally complete, we are frequently checking-in new writing and revisions as we go. Still, we do check our facts first and are confident the info we’ve submitted is accurate and useful. Still, if you find an error, particularly in one of our code examples, please let us know. You can create a new issue (https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/www.seleniumhq.org/issues).

We have worked very, very hard on this document. And, as just mentioned, we are once again working hard, on the new revision. Why? We absolutely believe this is the best tool for web-application testing. We feel its extensibility and flexibility, along with its tight integration with the browser, is unmatched by available proprietary tools. We are very excited to promote Selenium and, hopefully, to expand its user community. In short, we really want to “get the word out” about Selenium.

We believe you will be similarly excited once you understand how Selenium approaches test automation. It’s quite different from other automation tools. Whether you are brand-new to Selenium, or have been using it for awhile, we believe this documentation will truly help to spread the knowledge around. We have aimed our writing so that those completely new to test automation can use this document as a stepping stone. However, at the same time we have included a number of advanced, test design topics that should be interesting to the experienced software engineer. In both cases we have written the “Sel-Docs” to help test engineers of all abilities to quickly become productive writing your own Selenium tests. Experienced users and “newbies” alike will benefit from our Selenium User’s Guide.

Thanks very much for reading.

– the Selenium Documentation Team

01_introducing_selenium.jsp

Introduction¶

The Selenium-IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is the tool you use to develop your Selenium test cases. It’s an easy-to-use Firefox plug-in and is generally the most efficient way to develop test cases. It also contains a context menu that allows you to first select a UI element from the browser’s currently displayed page and then select from a list of Selenium commands with parameters pre-defined according to the context of the selected UI element. This is not only a time-saver, but also an excellent way of learning Selenium script syntax.

This chapter is all about the Selenium IDE and how to use it effectively.

Installing the IDE¶

Using Firefox, first, download the IDE from the SeleniumHQ downloads page

Firefox will protect you from installing addons from unfamiliar locations, so you will need to click ‘Allow’ to proceed with the installation, as shown in the following screenshot.

When downloading from Firefox, you’ll be presented with the following window.

Select Install Now. The Firefox Add-ons window pops up, first showing a progress bar, and when the download is complete, displays the following.

Restart Firefox. After Firefox reboots you will find the Selenium-IDE listed under the Firefox Tools menu.

Opening the IDE¶

To run the Selenium-IDE, simply select it from the Firefox Tools menu. It opens as follows with an empty script-editing window and a menu for loading, or creating new test cases.

IDE Features¶

Menu Bar¶

The File menu has options for Test Case and Test Suite (suite of Test Cases). Using these you can add a new Test Case, open a Test Case, save a Test Case, export Test Case in a language of your choice. You can also open the recent Test Case. All these options are also available for Test Suite.

The Edit menu allows copy, paste, delete, undo, and select all operations for editing the commands in your test case. The Options menu allows the changing of settings. You can set the timeout value for certain commands, add user-defined user extensions to the base set of Selenium commands, and specify the format (language) used when saving your test cases. The Help menu is the standard Firefox Help menu; only one item on this menu–UI-Element Documentation–pertains to Selenium-IDE.

Toolbar¶

The toolbar contains buttons for controlling the execution of your test cases, including a step feature for debugging your test cases. The right-most button, the one with the red-dot, is the record button.

Speed Control: controls how fast your test case runs.

Run All: Runs the entire test suite when a test suite with multiple test cases is loaded.

Run: Runs the currently selected test. When only a single test is loaded this button and the Run All button have the same effect.

Pause/Resume: Allows stopping and re-starting of a running test case.

Step: Allows you to “step” through a test case by running it one command at a time. Use for debugging test cases.

TestRunner Mode: Allows you to run the test case in a browser loaded with the Selenium-Core TestRunner. The TestRunner is not commonly used now and is likely to be deprecated. This button is for evaluating test cases for backwards compatibility with the TestRunner. Most users will probably not need this button.

Apply Rollup Rules: This advanced feature allows repetitive sequences of Selenium commands to be grouped into a single action. Detailed documentation on rollup rules can be found in the UI-Element Documentation on the Help menu.

Record: Records the user’s browser actions.

Test Case Pane¶

Your script is displayed in the test case pane. It has two tabs, one for displaying the command and their parameters in a readable “table” format.

The other tab - Source displays the test case in the native format in which the file will be stored. By default, this is HTML although it can be changed to a programming language such as Java or C#, or a scripting language like Python. See the Options menu for details. The Source view also allows one to edit the test case in its raw form, including copy, cut and paste operations.

The Command, Target, and Value entry fields display the currently selected command along with its parameters. These are entry fields where you can modify the currently selected command. The first parameter specified for a command in the Reference tab of the bottom pane always goes in the Target field. If a second parameter is specified by the Reference tab, it always goes in the Value field.

If you start typing in the Command field, a drop-down list will be populated based on the first characters you type; you can then select your desired command from the drop-down.

Log/Reference/UI-Element/Rollup Pane¶

The bottom pane is used for four different functions–Log, Reference, UI-Element, and Rollup–depending on which tab is selected.

Log¶

When you run your test case, error messages and information messages showing the progress are displayed in this pane automatically, even if you do not first select the Log tab. These messages are often useful for test case debugging. Notice the Clear button for clearing the Log. Also notice the Info button is a drop-down allowing selection of different levels of information to log.

Reference¶

The Reference tab is the default selection whenever you are entering or modifying Selenese commands and parameters in Table mode. In Table mode, the Reference pane will display documentation on the current command. When entering or modifying commands, whether from Table or Source mode, it is critically important to ensure that the parameters specified in the Target and Value fields match those specified in the parameter list in the Reference pane. The number of parameters provided must match the number specified, the order of parameters provided must match the order specified, and the type of parameters provided must match the type specified. If there is a mismatch in any of these three areas, the command will not run correctly.

While the Reference tab is invaluable as a quick reference, it is still often necessary to consult the Selenium Reference document.

UI-Element and Rollup¶

Detailed information on these two panes (which cover advanced features) can be found in the UI-Element Documentation on the Help menu of Selenium-IDE.

Building Test Cases¶

There are three primary methods for developing test cases. Frequently, a test developer will require all three techniques.

Recording¶

Many first-time users begin by recording a test case from their interactions with a website. When Selenium-IDE is first opened, the record button is ON by default. If you do not want Selenium-IDE to begin recording automatically you can turn this off by going under Options > Options... and deselecting “Start recording immediately on open.”

During recording, Selenium-IDE will automatically insert commands into your test case based on your actions. Typically, this will include:

clicking a link - click or clickAndWait commands
entering values - type command
selecting options from a drop-down listbox - select command
clicking checkboxes or radio buttons - click command

Here are some “gotchas” to be aware of:

The type command may require clicking on some other area of the web page for it to record.
Following a link usually records a click command. You will often need to change this to clickAndWait to ensure your test case pauses until the new page is completely loaded. Otherwise, your test case will continue running commands before the page has loaded all its UI elements. This will cause unexpected test case failures.

Adding Verifications and Asserts With the Context Menu¶

Your test cases will also need to check the properties of a web-page. This requires assert and verify commands. We won’t describe the specifics of these commands here; that is in the chapter on Selenium Commands – “Selenese”. Here we’ll simply describe how to add them to your test case.

With Selenium-IDE recording, go to the browser displaying your test application and right click anywhere on the page. You will see a context menu showing verify and/or assert commands.

The first time you use Selenium, there may only be one Selenium command listed. As you use the IDE however, you will find additional commands will quickly be added to this menu. Selenium-IDE will attempt to predict what command, along with the parameters, you will need for a selected UI element on the current web-page.

Let’s see how this works. Open a web-page of your choosing and select a block of text on the page. A paragraph or a heading will work fine. Now, right-click the selected text. The context menu should give you a verifyTextPresent command and the suggested parameter should be the text itself.

Also, notice the Show All Available Commands menu option. This shows many, many more commands, again, along with suggested parameters, for testing your currently selected UI element.

Try a few more UI elements. Try right-clicking an image, or a user control like a button or a checkbox. You may need to use Show All Available Commands to see options other than verifyTextPresent. Once you select these other options, the more commonly used ones will show up on the primary context menu. For example, selecting verifyElementPresent for an image should later cause that command to be available on the primary context menu the next time you select an image and right-click.

Again, these commands will be explained in detail in the chapter on Selenium commands. For now though, feel free to use the IDE to record and select commands into a test case and then run it. You can learn a lot about the Selenium commands simply by experimenting with the IDE.

Editing¶

Insert Command¶

Table View¶

Select the point in your test case where you want to insert the command. To do this, in the Test Case Pane, left-click on the line where you want to insert a new command. Right-click and select Insert Command; the IDE will add a blank line just ahead of the line you selected. Now use the command editing text fields to enter your new command and its parameters.

Source View¶

Select the point in your test case where you want to insert the command. To do this, in the Test Case Pane, left-click between the commands where you want to insert a new command, and enter the HTML tags needed to create a 3-column row containing the Command, first parameter (if one is required by the Command), and second parameter (again, if one is required to locate an element) and third parameter(again, if one is required to have a value). Example:

<tr>

<td>Command</td>

<td>target (locator)</td>

<td>Value</td>

</tr>

Insert Comment¶

Comments may be added to make your test case more readable. These comments are ignored when the test case is run.

Comments may also be used to add vertical white space (one or more blank lines) in your tests; just create empty comments. An empty command will cause an error during execution; an empty comment won’t.

Table View¶

Select the line in your test case where you want to insert the comment. Right-click and select Insert Comment. Now use the Command field to enter the comment. Your comment will appear in purple text.

Source View¶

Select the point in your test case where you want to insert the comment. Add an HTML-style comment, i.e., .

Edit a Command or Comment¶

Table View¶

Simply select the line to be changed and edit it using the Command, Target, and Value fields.

Source View¶

Since Source view provides the equivalent of a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor, simply modify which line you wish–command, parameter, or comment.

Opening and Saving a Test Case¶

Like most programs, there are Save and Open commands under the File menu. However, Selenium distinguishes between test cases and test suites. To save your Selenium-IDE tests for later use you can either save the individual test cases, or save the test suite. If the test cases of your test suite have not been saved, you’ll be prompted to save them before saving the test suite.

When you open an existing test case or suite, Selenium-IDE displays its Selenium commands in the Test Case Pane.

Running Test Cases¶

The IDE allows many options for running your test case. You can run a test case all at once, stop and start it, run it one line at a time, run a single command you are currently developing, and you can do a batch run of an entire test suite. Execution of test cases is very flexible in the IDE.

Run a Test Case

Click the Run button to run the currently displayed test case.

Run a Test Suite

Click the Run All button to run all the test cases in the currently loaded test suite.

Stop and Start

The Pause button can be used to stop the test case while it is running. The icon of this button then changes to indicate the Resume button. To continue click Resume.

Stop in the Middle

You can set a breakpoint in the test case to cause it to stop on a particular command. This is useful for debugging your test case. To set a breakpoint, select a command, right-click, and from the context menu select Toggle Breakpoint.

Start from the Middle

You can tell the IDE to begin running from a specific command in the middle of the test case. This also is used for debugging. To set a startpoint, select a command, right-click, and from the context menu select Set/Clear Start Point.

Run Any Single Command

Double-click any single command to run it by itself. This is useful when writing a single command. It lets you immediately test a command you are constructing, when you are not sure if it is correct. You can double-click it to see if it runs correctly. This is also available from the context menu.

Using Base URL to Run Test Cases in Different Domains¶

The Base URL field at the top of the Selenium-IDE window is very useful for allowing test cases to be run across different domains. Suppose that a site named http://news.portal.com had an in-house beta site named http://beta.news.portal.com. Any test cases for these sites that begin with an open statement should specify a relative URL as the argument to open rather than an absolute URL (one starting with a protocol such as http: or https:). Selenium-IDE will then create an absolute URL by appending the open command’s argument onto the end of the value of Base URL. For example, the test case below would be run against http://news.portal.com/about.html:

This same test case with a modified Base URL setting would be run against http://beta.news.portal.com/about.html:

Selenium Commands – “Selenese”¶

Selenium commands, often called selenese, are the set of commands that run your tests. A sequence of these commands is a test script. Here we explain those commands in detail, and we present the many choices you have in testing your web application when using Selenium.

Selenium provides a rich set of commands for fully testing your web-app in virtually any way you can imagine. The command set is often called selenese. These commands essentially create a testing language.

In selenese, one can test the existence of UI elements based on their HTML tags, test for specific content, test for broken links, input fields, selection list options, submitting forms, and table data among other things. In addition Selenium commands support testing of window size, mouse position, alerts, Ajax functionality, pop up windows, event handling, and many other web-application features. The Command Reference lists all the available commands.

A command 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”.

All Selenium Assertions can be used in 3 modes: “assert”, “verify”, and ” waitFor”. For example, you can “assertText”, “verifyText” and “waitForText”. When an “assert” fails, the test is aborted. When a “verify” fails, the test will continue execution, logging the failure. This allows a single “assert” to ensure that the application is on the correct page, followed by a bunch of “verify” assertions to test form field values, labels, etc.

“waitFor” commands wait for some condition to become true (which can be useful for testing Ajax applications). They will succeed immediately if the condition is already true. However, they will fail and halt the test if the condition does not become true within the current timeout setting (see the setTimeout action below).

Script Syntax¶

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

verifyText

//div//a[2]

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.

Locators, text patterns, selenium variables, and the commands themselves are described in considerable detail in the section on Selenium Commands.

Selenium scripts that will be run from Selenium-IDE will be stored in an HTML text file format. This consists of an HTML table with three columns. The first column identifies the Selenium command, the second is a target, and the final column contains a value. The second and third columns may not require values depending on the chosen Selenium command, but they should be present. Each table row represents a new Selenium command. Here is an example of a test that opens a page, asserts the page title and then verifies some content on the page:

<table>

<tr><td>open</td><td>/download/</td><td></td></tr>

<tr><td>assertTitle</td><td></td><td>Downloads</td></tr>

<tr><td>verifyText</td><td>//h2</td><td>Downloads</td></tr>

</table>

Rendered as a table in a browser this would look like the following:

open	/download/
assertTitle		Downloads
verifyText	//h2	Downloads

The Selenese HTML syntax can be used to write and run tests without requiring knowledge of a programming language. With a basic knowledge of selenese and Selenium-IDE you can quickly produce and run testcases.

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.

<html>

<head>

<title>Test Suite Function Tests - Priority 1</title>

</head>

<body>

<table>

<tr><td><b>Suite Of Tests</b></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./Login.html">Login</a></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./SearchValues.html">Test Searching for Values</a></td></tr>

</table>

</body>

</html>

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 then some simple programming would be involved in setting up a test suite. Since the whole reason for using Selenium-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 its 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.

Verifying Page Elements¶

Verifying UI elements on a web page is probably the most common feature of your automated tests. Selenese allows multiple ways of checking for UI elements. It is important that you understand these different methods because these methods define what you are actually testing.

For example, will you test that...

an element is present somewhere on the page?
specific text is somewhere on the page?
specific text is at a specific location on the page?

For example, if you are testing a text heading, the text and its position at the top of the page are probably relevant for your test. If, however, you are testing for the existence of an image on the home page, and the web designers frequently change the specific image file along with its position on the page, then you only want to test that an image (as opposed to the specific image file) exists somewhere on the page.

Assertion or Verification?¶

Choosing between “assert” and “verify” comes down to convenience and management of failures. There’s very little point checking that the first paragraph on the page is the correct one if your test has already failed when checking that the browser is displaying the expected page. If you’re not on the correct page, you’ll probably want to abort your test case so that you can investigate the cause and fix the issue(s) promptly. On the other hand, you may want to check many attributes of a page without aborting the test case on the first failure as this will allow you to review all failures on the page and take the appropriate action. Effectively an “assert” will fail the test and abort the current test case, whereas a “verify” will fail the test and continue to run the test case.

The best use of this feature is to logically group your test commands, and start each group with an “assert” followed by one or more “verify” test commands. An example follows:

Command	Target	Value
open	/download/
assertTitle	Downloads
verifyText	//h2	Downloads
assertTable	1.2.1	Selenium IDE
verifyTable	1.2.2	June 3, 2008
verifyTable	1.2.3	1.0 beta 2

The above example first opens a page and then “asserts” that the correct page is loaded by comparing the title with the expected value. Only if this passes will the following command run and “verify” that the text is present in the expected location. The test case then “asserts” the first column in the second row of the first table contains the expected value, and only if this passed will the remaining cells in that row be “verified”.

verifyTextPresent¶

The command verifyTextPresent is used to verify specific text exists somewhere on the page. It takes a single argument–the text pattern to be verified. For example:

Command	Target	Value
verifyTextPresent	Marketing Analysis

This would cause Selenium to search for, and verify, that the text string “Marketing Analysis” appears somewhere on the page currently being tested. Use verifyTextPresent when you are interested in only the text itself being present on the page. Do not use this when you also need to test where the text occurs on the page.

verifyElementPresent¶

Use this command when you must test for the presence of a specific UI element, rather than its content. This verification does not check the text, only the HTML tag. One common use is to check for the presence of an image.

Command	Target	Value
verifyElementPresent	//div/p/img

This command verifies that an image, specified by the existence of an <img> HTML tag, is present on the page, and that it follows a <div> tag and a <p> tag. The first (and only) parameter is a locator for telling the Selenese command how to find the element. Locators are explained in the next section.

verifyElementPresent can be used to check the existence of any HTML tag within the page. You can check the existence of links, paragraphs, divisions <div>, etc. Here are a few more examples.

Command	Target	Value
verifyElementPresent	//div/p
verifyElementPresent	//div/a
verifyElementPresent	id=Login
verifyElementPresent	link=Go to Marketing Research
verifyElementPresent	//a[2]
verifyElementPresent	//head/title

These examples illustrate the variety of ways a UI element may be tested. Again, locators are explained in the next section.

verifyText¶

Use verifyText when both the text and its UI element must be tested. verifyText must use a locator. If you choose an XPath or DOM locator, you can verify that specific text appears at a specific location on the page relative to other UI components on the page.

Command	Target	Value
verifyText	//table/tr/td/div/p	This is my text and it occurs right after the div inside the table.

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 Identifier¶

This is probably the most common method of locating elements and is the catch-all default when no recognized locator type is used. With this strategy, the first element with the id attribute value matching the location will be used. If no element has a matching id attribute, then the first element with a name attribute matching the location will be used.

For instance, your page source could have id and name attributes as follows:

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

The following locator strategies would return the elements from the HTML snippet above indicated by line number:

identifier=loginForm (3)
identifier=password (5)
identifier=continue (6)
continue (6)

Since the identifier type of locator is the default, the identifier= in the first three examples above is not necessary.

Locating by Id¶

This type of locator is more limited than the identifier locator type, but also more explicit. Use this when you know an element’s id attribute.

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

id=loginForm (3)

Locating by Name¶

The name locator type will locate the first element with a matching name attribute. If multiple elements have the same value for a name attribute, then you can use filters to further refine your location strategy. The default filter type is value (matching the value attribute).

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

name=username (4)
name=continue value=Clear (7)
name=continue Clear (7)
name=continue type=button (7)

Note

Unlike some types of XPath and DOM locators, the three types of locators above allow Selenium to test a UI element independent of its location on the page. So if the page structure and organization is altered, the test will still pass. You may or may not want to also test whether the page structure changes. In the case where web designers frequently alter the page, but its functionality must be regression tested, testing via id and name attributes, or really via any HTML property, becomes very important.

Locating by XPath¶

XPath is the language used for locating nodes in an XML document. As HTML can be an implementation of XML (XHTML), Selenium users can leverage this powerful language to target elements in their web applications. XPath extends beyond (as well as supporting) the simple methods of locating by id or name attributes, and opens up all sorts of new possibilities such as locating the third checkbox on the page.

One of the main reasons for using XPath is when you don’t have a suitable id or name attribute for the element you wish to locate. You can use XPath to either locate the element in absolute terms (not advised), or relative to an element that does have an id or name attribute. XPath locators can also be used to specify elements via attributes other than id and name.

Absolute XPaths contain the location of all elements from the root (html) and as a result are likely to fail with only the slightest adjustment to the application. By finding a nearby element with an id or name attribute (ideally a parent element) you can locate your target element based on the relationship. This is much less likely to change and can make your tests more robust.

Since only xpath locators start with “//”, it is not necessary to include the xpath= label when specifying an XPath locator.

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

xpath=/html/body/form[1] (3) - Absolute path (would break if the HTML was changed only slightly)
//form[1] (3) - First form element in the HTML
xpath=//form[@id='loginForm'] (3) - The form element with attribute named ‘id’ and the value ‘loginForm’
xpath=//form[input/@name='username'] (3) - First form element with an input child element with attribute named ‘name’ and the value ‘username’
//input[@name='username'] (4) - First input element with attribute named ‘name’ and the value ‘username’
//form[@id='loginForm']/input[1] (4) - First input child element of the form element with attribute named ‘id’ and the value ‘loginForm’
//input[@name='continue'][@type='button'] (7) - Input with attribute named ‘name’ and the value ‘continue’ and attribute named ‘type’ and the value ‘button’
//form[@id='loginForm']/input[4] (7) - Fourth input child element of the form element with attribute named ‘id’ and value ‘loginForm’

These examples cover some basics, but in order to learn more, the following references are recommended:

There are also a couple of very useful Firefox Add-ons that can assist in discovering the XPath of an element:

XPath Checker - suggests XPath and can be used to test XPath results.
Firebug - XPath suggestions are just one of the many powerful features of this very useful add-on.

Locating Hyperlinks by Link Text¶

This is a simple method of locating a hyperlink in your web page by using the text of the link. If two links with the same text are present, then the first match will be used.

<html>

<body>

<a href="continue.html">Continue</a>

<a href="cancel.html">Cancel</a>

</body>

<html>

link=Continue (4)
link=Cancel (5)

Locating by DOM¶

The Document Object Model represents an HTML document and can be accessed using JavaScript. This location strategy takes JavaScript that evaluates to an element on the page, which can be simply the element’s location using the hierarchical dotted notation.

Since only dom locators start with “document”, it is not necessary to include the dom= label when specifying a DOM locator.

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

dom=document.getElementById('loginForm') (3)
dom=document.forms['loginForm'] (3)
dom=document.forms[0] (3)
document.forms[0].username (4)
document.forms[0].elements['username'] (4)
document.forms[0].elements[0] (4)
document.forms[0].elements[3] (7)

You can use Selenium itself as well as other sites and extensions to explore the DOM of your web application. A good reference exists on W3Schools.

Locating by CSS¶

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language for describing the rendering of HTML and XML documents. CSS uses Selectors for binding style properties to elements in the document. These Selectors can be used by Selenium as another locating strategy.

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

css=form#loginForm (3)
css=input[name="username"] (4)
css=input.required[type="text"] (4)
css=input.passfield (5)
css=#loginForm input[type="button"] (7)
css=#loginForm input:nth-child(2) (5)

For more information about CSS Selectors, the best place to go is the W3C publication. You’ll find additional references there.

Note

Most experienced Selenium users recommend CSS as their locating strategy of choice as it’s considerably faster than XPath and can find the most complicated objects in an intrinsic HTML document.

Implicit Locators¶

You can choose to omit the locator type in the following situations:

Locators without an explicitly defined locator strategy will default to using the identifier locator strategy. See Locating by Identifier.
Locators starting with “//” will use the XPath locator strategy. See Locating by XPath.
Locators starting with “document” will use the DOM locator strategy. See Locating by DOM

Matching Text Patterns¶

Like locators, patterns are a type of parameter frequently required by Selenese commands. Examples of commands which require patterns are verifyTextPresent, verifyTitle, verifyAlert, assertConfirmation, verifyText, and verifyPrompt. And as has been mentioned above, link locators can utilize a pattern. Patterns allow you to describe, via the use of special characters, what text is expected rather than having to specify that text exactly.

There are three types of patterns: globbing, regular expressions, and exact.

Globbing Patterns¶

Most people are familiar with globbing as it is utilized in filename expansion at a DOS or Unix/Linux command line such as ls *.c. In this case, globbing is used to display all the files ending with a .c extension that exist in the current directory. Globbing is fairly limited. Only two special characters are supported in the Selenium implementation:

* which translates to “match anything,” i.e., nothing, a single character, or many characters.

[ ] (character class) which translates to “match any single character found inside the square brackets.” A dash (hyphen) can be used as a shorthand to specify a range of characters (which are contiguous in the ASCII character set). A few examples will make the functionality of a character class clear:

[aeiou] matches any lowercase vowel

[0-9] matches any digit

[a-zA-Z0-9] matches any alphanumeric character

In most other contexts, globbing includes a third special character, the ?. However, Selenium globbing patterns only support the asterisk and character class.

To specify a globbing pattern parameter for a Selenese command, you can prefix the pattern with a glob: label. However, because globbing patterns are the default, you can also omit the label and specify just the pattern itself.

Below is an example of two commands that use globbing patterns. The actual link text on the page being tested was “Film/Television Department”; by using a pattern rather than the exact text, the click command will work even if the link text is changed to “Film & Television Department” or “Film and Television Department”. The glob pattern’s asterisk will match “anything or nothing” between the word “Film” and the word “Television”.

Command	Target	Value
click	link=glob:Film*Television Department
verifyTitle	glob:FilmTelevision*

The actual title of the page reached by clicking on the link was “De Anza Film And Television Department - Menu”. By using a pattern rather than the exact text, the verifyTitle will pass as long as the two words “Film” and “Television” appear (in that order) anywhere in the page’s title. For example, if the page’s owner should shorten the title to just “Film & Television Department,” the test would still pass. Using a pattern for both a link and a simple test that the link worked (such as the verifyTitle above does) can greatly reduce the maintenance for such test cases.

Regular Expression Patterns¶

Regular expression patterns are the most powerful of the three types of patterns that Selenese supports. Regular expressions are also supported by most high-level programming languages, many text editors, and a host of tools, including the Linux/Unix command-line utilities grep, sed, and awk. In Selenese, regular expression patterns allow a user to perform many tasks that would be very difficult otherwise. For example, suppose your test needed to ensure that a particular table cell contained nothing but a number. regexp: [0-9]+ is a simple pattern that will match a decimal number of any length.

Whereas Selenese globbing patterns support only the * and [ ] (character class) features, Selenese regular expression patterns offer the same wide array of special characters that exist in JavaScript. Below are a subset of those special characters:

PATTERN	MATCH
.	any single character
[ ]	character class: any single character that appears inside the brackets
*	quantifier: 0 or more of the preceding character (or group)
+	quantifier: 1 or more of the preceding character (or group)
?	quantifier: 0 or 1 of the preceding character (or group)
{1,5}	quantifier: 1 through 5 of the preceding character (or group)
\|	alternation: the character/group on the left or the character/group on the right
( )	grouping: often used with alternation and/or quantifier

Regular expression patterns in Selenese need to be prefixed with either regexp: or regexpi:. The former is case-sensitive; the latter is case-insensitive.

A few examples will help clarify how regular expression patterns can be used with Selenese commands. The first one uses what is probably the most commonly used regular expression pattern–.* (“dot star”). This two-character sequence can be translated as “0 or more occurrences of any character” or more simply, “anything or nothing.” It is the equivalent of the one-character globbing pattern * (a single asterisk).

Command	Target	Value
click	link=regexp:Film.*Television Department
verifyTitle	regexp:.Film.Television.*

The example above is functionally equivalent to the earlier example that used globbing patterns for this same test. The only differences are the prefix (regexp: instead of glob:) and the “anything or nothing” pattern (.* instead of just *).

The more complex example below tests that the Yahoo! Weather page for Anchorage, Alaska contains info on the sunrise time:

Command	Target	Value
open	http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/USAK0012.html
verifyTextPresent	regexp:Sunrise: *[0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{2} [ap]m

Let’s examine the regular expression above one part at a time:

Sunrise: *	The string Sunrise: followed by 0 or more spaces
[0-9]{1,2}	1 or 2 digits (for the hour of the day)
:	The character : (no special characters involved)
[0-9]{2}	2 digits (for the minutes) followed by a space
[ap]m	“a” or “p” followed by “m” (am or pm)

Exact Patterns¶

The exact type of Selenium pattern is of marginal usefulness. It uses no special characters at all. So, if you needed to look for an actual asterisk character (which is special for both globbing and regular expression patterns), the exact pattern would be one way to do that. For example, if you wanted to select an item labeled “Real *” from a dropdown, the following code might work or it might not. The asterisk in the glob:Real * pattern will match anything or nothing. So, if there was an earlier select option labeled “Real Numbers,” it would be the option selected rather than the “Real *” option.

select

//select

glob:Real *

In order to ensure that the “Real *” item would be selected, the exact: prefix could be used to create an exact pattern as shown below:

select

//select

exact:Real *

But the same effect could be achieved via escaping the asterisk in a regular expression pattern:

select

//select

regexp:Real \*

It’s rather unlikely that most testers will ever need to look for an asterisk or a set of square brackets with characters inside them (the character class for globbing patterns). Thus, globbing patterns and regular expression patterns are sufficient for the vast majority of us.

The “AndWait” Commands¶

The difference between a command and its AndWait alternative is that the regular command (e.g. click) will do the action and continue with the following command as fast as it can, while the AndWait alternative (e.g. clickAndWait) tells Selenium to wait for the page to load after the action has been done.

The AndWait alternative is always used when the action causes the browser to navigate to another page or reload the present one.

Be aware, if you use an AndWait command for an action that does not trigger a navigation/refresh, your test will fail. This happens because Selenium will reach the AndWait‘s timeout without seeing any navigation or refresh being made, causing Selenium to raise a timeout exception.

The waitFor Commands in AJAX applications¶

In AJAX driven web applications, data is retrieved from server without refreshing the page. Using andWait commands will not work as the page is not actually refreshed. Pausing the test execution for a certain period of time is also not a good approach as web element might appear later or earlier than the stipulated period depending on the system’s responsiveness, load or other uncontrolled factors of the moment, leading to test failures. The best approach would be to wait for the needed element in a dynamic period and then continue the execution as soon as the element is found.

This is done using waitFor commands, as waitForElementPresent or waitForVisible, which wait dynamically, checking for the desired condition every second and continuing to the next command in the script as soon as the condition is met.

Sequence of Evaluation and Flow Control¶

When a script runs, it simply runs in sequence, one command after another.

Selenese, by itself, does not support condition statements (if-else, etc.) or iteration (for, while, etc.). Many useful tests can be conducted without flow control. However, for a functional test of dynamic content, possibly involving multiple pages, programming logic is often needed.

When flow control is needed, there are three options:

Run the script using Selenium-RC and a client library such as Java or PHP to utilize the programming language’s flow control features.
Run a small JavaScript snippet from within the script using the storeEval command.
Install the goto_sel_ide.js extension.

Most testers will export the test script into a programming language file that uses the Selenium-RC API (see the Selenium-IDE chapter). However, some organizations prefer to run their scripts from Selenium-IDE whenever possible (for instance, when they have many junior-level people running tests for them, or when programming skills are lacking). If this is your case, consider a JavaScript snippet or the goto_sel_ide.js extension.

Store Commands and Selenium Variables¶

You can use Selenium variables to store constants at the beginning of a script. Also, when combined with a data-driven test design (discussed in a later section), Selenium variables can be used to store values passed to your test program from the command-line, from another program, or from a file.

The plain store command is the most basic of the many store commands and can be used to simply store a constant value in a selenium variable. It takes two parameters, the text value to be stored and a selenium variable. Use the standard variable naming conventions of only alphanumeric characters when choosing a name for your variable.

Command	Target	Value
store	paul@mysite.org	userName

Later in your script, you’ll want to use the stored value of your variable. To access the value of a variable, enclose the variable in curly brackets ({}) and precede it with a dollar sign like this.

Command	Target	Value
verifyText	//div/p	${userName}

A common use of variables is for storing input for an input field.

Command	Target	Value
type	id=login	${userName}

Selenium variables can be used in either the first or second parameter and are interpreted by Selenium prior to any other operations performed by the command. A Selenium variable may also be used within a locator expression.

An equivalent store command exists for each verify and assert command. Here are a couple more commonly used 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.

JavaScript and Selenese Parameters¶

JavaScript can be used with two types of Selenese parameters: script and non-script (usually expressions). In most cases, you’ll want to access and/or manipulate a test case variable inside the JavaScript snippet used as a Selenese parameter. All variables created in your test case are stored in a JavaScript associative array. An associative array has string indexes rather than sequential numeric indexes. The associative array containing your test case’s variables is named storedVars. Whenever you wish to access or manipulate a variable within a JavaScript snippet, you must refer to it as storedVars[‘yourVariableName’].

JavaScript Usage with Script Parameters¶

Several Selenese commands specify a script parameter including assertEval, verifyEval, storeEval, and waitForEval. These parameters require no special syntax. A Selenium-IDE user would simply place a snippet of JavaScript code into the appropriate field, normally the Target field (because a script parameter is normally the first or only parameter).

The example below illustrates how a JavaScript snippet can be used to perform a simple numerical calculation:

Command	Target	Value
store	10	hits
storeXpathCount	//blockquote	blockquotes
storeEval	storedVars[‘hits’]-storedVars[‘blockquotes’]	paragraphs

This next example illustrates how a JavaScript snippet can include calls to methods, in this case the JavaScript String object’s toUpperCase method and toLowerCase method.

Command	Target	Value
store	Edith Wharton	name
storeEval	storedVars[‘name’].toUpperCase()	uc
storeEval	storedVars[‘name’].toLowerCase()	lc

JavaScript Usage with Non-Script Parameters¶

JavaScript can also be used to help generate values for parameters, even when the parameter is not specified to be of type script. However, in this case, special syntax is required–the entire parameter value must be prefixed by javascript{ with a trailing }, which encloses the JavaScript snippet, as in javascript{*yourCodeHere*}. Below is an example in which the type command’s second parameter value is generated via JavaScript code using this special syntax:

Command	Target	Value
store	league of nations	searchString
type	q	javascript{storedVars[‘searchString’].toUpperCase()}

echo - The Selenese Print Command¶

Selenese has a simple command that allows you to print text to your test’s output. This is useful for providing informational progress notes in your test which display on the console as your test is running. These notes also can be used to provide context within your test result reports, which can be useful for finding where a defect exists on a page in the event your test finds a problem. Finally, echo statements can be used to print the contents of Selenium variables.

Alerts, Popups, and Multiple Windows¶

Suppose that you are testing a page that looks like this.

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

<html>

<head>

function output(resultText){

document.getElementById('output').childNodes[0].nodeValue=resultText;

}

function show_confirm(){

var confirmation=confirm("Chose an option.");

if (confirmation==true){

output("Confirmed.");

}

else{

output("Rejected!");

}

function show_alert(){

alert("I'm blocking!");

output("Alert is gone.");

}

function show_prompt(){

var response = prompt("What's the best web QA tool?","Selenium");

output(response);

}

function open_window(windowName){

window.open("newWindow.html",windowName);

}

</script>

</head>

<body>

<a href="newWindow.html" id="lnkNewWindow" target="_blank">New Window Link</a>

<br />

</span>

</body>

</html>

The user must respond to alert/confirm boxes, as well as moving focus to newly opened popup windows. Fortunately, Selenium can cover JavaScript pop-ups.

But before we begin covering alerts/confirms/prompts in individual detail, it is helpful to understand the commonality between them. Alerts, confirmation boxes and prompts all have variations of the following

Command	Description
assertFoo(pattern)	throws error if pattern doesn’t match the text of the pop-up
assertFooPresent	throws error if pop-up is not available
assertFooNotPresent	throws error if any pop-up is present
storeFoo(variable)	stores the text of the pop-up in a variable
storeFooPresent(variable)	stores the text of the pop-up in a variable and returns true or false

When running under Selenium, JavaScript pop-ups will not appear. This is because the function calls are actually being overridden at runtime by Selenium’s own JavaScript. However, just because you cannot see the pop-up doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with it. To handle a pop-up, you must call its assertFoo(pattern) function. If you fail to assert the presence of a pop-up your next command will be blocked and you will get an error similar to the following [error] Error: There was an unexpected Confirmation! [Chose an option.]

Alerts¶

Let’s start with alerts because they are the simplest pop-up to handle. To begin, open the HTML sample above in a browser and click on the “Show alert” button. You’ll notice that after you close the alert the text “Alert is gone.” is displayed on the page. Now run through the same steps with Selenium IDE recording, and verify the text is added after you close the alert. Your test will look something like this:

Command	Target	Value
open	/
click	btnAlert
assertAlert	I’m blocking!
verifyTextPresent	Alert is gone.

You may be thinking “That’s odd, I never tried to assert that alert.” But this is Selenium-IDE handling and closing the alert for you. If you remove that step and replay the test you will get the following error [error] Error: There was an unexpected Alert! [I'm blocking!]. You must include an assertion of the alert to acknowledge its presence.

If you just want to assert that an alert is present but either don’t know or don’t care what text it contains, you can use assertAlertPresent. This will return true or false, with false halting the test.

Confirmations¶

Confirmations behave in much the same way as alerts, with assertConfirmation and assertConfirmationPresent offering the same characteristics as their alert counterparts. However, by default Selenium will select OK when a confirmation pops up. Try recording clicking on the “Show confirm box” button in the sample page, but click on the “Cancel” button in the popup, then assert the output text. Your test may look something like this:

Command	Target	Value
open	/
click	btnConfirm
chooseCancelOnNextConfirmation
assertConfirmation	Choose an option.
verifyTextPresent	Rejected

The chooseCancelOnNextConfirmation function tells Selenium that all following confirmation should return false. It can be reset by calling chooseOkOnNextConfirmation.

You may notice that you cannot replay this test, because Selenium complains that there is an unhandled confirmation. This is because the order of events Selenium-IDE records causes the click and chooseCancelOnNextConfirmation to be put in the wrong order (it makes sense if you think about it, Selenium can’t know that you’re cancelling before you open a confirmation) Simply switch these two commands and your test will run fine.

Prompts¶

Prompts behave in much the same way as alerts, with assertPrompt and assertPromptPresent offering the same characteristics as their alert counterparts. By default, Selenium will wait for you to input data when the prompt pops up. Try recording clicking on the “Show prompt” button in the sample page and enter “Selenium” into the prompt. Your test may look something like this:

Command	Target	Value
open	/
answerOnNextPrompt	Selenium!
click	id=btnPrompt
assertPrompt	What’s the best web QA tool?
verifyTextPresent	Selenium!

If you choose cancel on the prompt, you may notice that answerOnNextPrompt will simply show a target of blank. Selenium treats cancel and a blank entry on the prompt basically as the same thing.

Debugging¶

Debugging means finding and fixing errors in your test case. This is a normal part of test case development.

We won’t teach debugging here as most new users to Selenium will already have some basic experience with debugging. If this is new to you, we recommend you ask one of the developers in your organization.

Breakpoints and Startpoints¶

The Sel-IDE supports the setting of breakpoints and the ability to start and stop the running of a test case, from any point within the test case. That is, one can run up to a specific command in the middle of the test case and inspect how the test case behaves at that point. To do this, set a breakpoint on the command just before the one to be examined.

To set a breakpoint, select a command, right-click, and from the context menu select Toggle Breakpoint. Then click the Run button to run your test case from the beginning up to the breakpoint.

It is also sometimes useful to run a test case from somewhere in the middle to the end of the test case or up to a breakpoint that follows the starting point. For example, suppose your test case first logs into the website and then performs a series of tests and you are trying to debug one of those tests. However, you only need to login once, but you need to keep rerunning your tests as you are developing them. You can login once, then run your test case from a startpoint placed after the login portion of your test case. That will prevent you from having to manually logout each time you rerun your test case.

To set a startpoint, select a command, right-click, and from the context menu select Set/Clear Start Point. Then click the Run button to execute the test case beginning at that startpoint.

Stepping Through a Testcase¶

To execute a test case one command at a time (“step through” it), follow these steps:

Start the test case running with the Run button from the toolbar.

Immediately pause the executing test case with the Pause button.

Repeatedly select the Step button.

Find Button¶

The Find button is used to see which UI element on the currently displayed webpage (in the browser) is used in the currently selected Selenium command. This is useful when building a locator for a command’s first parameter (see the section on locators in the Selenium Commands chapter). It can be used with any command that identifies a UI element on a webpage, i.e. click, clickAndWait, type, and certain assert and verify commands, among others.

From Table view, select any command that has a locator parameter. Click the Find button. Now look on the webpage: There should be a bright green rectangle enclosing the element specified by the locator parameter.

Page Source for Debugging¶

Often, when debugging a test case, you simply must look at the page source (the HTML for the webpage you’re trying to test) to determine a problem. Firefox makes this easy. Simply right-click the webpage and select ‘View->Page Source. The HTML opens in a separate window. Use its Search feature (Edit=>Find) to search for a keyword to find the HTML for the UI element you’re trying to test.

Alternatively, select just that portion of the webpage for which you want to see the source. Then right-click the webpage and select View Selection Source. In this case, the separate HTML window will contain just a small amount of source, with highlighting on the portion representing your selection.

Locator Assistance¶

Whenever Selenium-IDE records a locator-type argument, it stores additional information which allows the user to view other possible locator-type arguments that could be used instead. This feature can be very useful for learning more about locators, and is often needed to help one build a different type of locator than the type that was recorded.

This locator assistance is presented on the Selenium-IDE window as a drop-down list accessible at the right end of the Target field (only when the Target field contains a recorded locator-type argument). Below is a snapshot showing the contents of this drop-down for one command. Note that the first column of the drop-down provides alternative locators, whereas the second column indicates the type of each alternative.

Writing a Test Suite¶

A test suite is a collection of test cases which is displayed in the leftmost pane in the IDE. The test suite pane can be manually opened or closed via selecting a small dot halfway down the right edge of the pane (which is the left edge of the entire Selenium-IDE window if the pane is closed).

The test suite pane will be automatically opened when an existing test suite is opened or when the user selects the New Test Case item from the File menu. In the latter case, the new test case will appear immediately below the previous test case.

Selenium-IDE also supports loading pre-existing test cases by using the File -> Add Test Case menu option. This allows you to add existing test cases to a new test suite.

A test suite file is an HTML file containing a one-column table. Each cell of each row in the <tbody> section contains a link to a test case. The example below is of a test suite containing four test cases:

<html>

<head>

<title>Sample Selenium Test Suite</title>

</head>

<body>

<thead>

<tr><td>Test Cases for De Anza A-Z Directory Links</td></tr>

</thead>

<tbody>

<tr><td><a href="./a.html">A Links</a></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./b.html">B Links</a></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./c.html">C Links</a></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./d.html">D Links</a></td></tr>

</tbody>

</table>

</body>

</html>

Note

Test case files should not have to be co-located with the test suite file that invokes them. And on Mac OS and Linux systems, that is indeed the case. However, at the time of this writing, a bug prevents Windows users from being able to place the test cases elsewhere than with the test suite that invokes them.

User Extensions¶

User extensions are JavaScript files that allow one to create his or her own customizations and features to add additional functionality. Often this is in the form of customized commands although this extensibility is not limited to additional commands.

There are a number of useful extensions created by users.

IMPORTANT: THIS SECTION IS OUT OF DATE–WE WILL BE REVISING THIS SOON.

Perhaps the most popular of all Selenium-IDE extensions is one which provides flow control in the form of while loops and primitive conditionals. This extension is the goto_sel_ide.js. For an example of how to use the functionality provided by this extension, look at the page created by its author.

To install this extension, put the pathname to its location on your computer in the Selenium Core extensions field of Selenium-IDE’s Options=>Options=>General tab.

After selecting the OK button, you must close and reopen Selenium-IDE in order for the extensions file to be read. Any change you make to an extension will also require you to close and reopen Selenium-IDE.

Information on writing your own extensions can be found near the bottom of the Selenium Reference document.

Sometimes it can prove very useful to debug step by step Selenium IDE and your User Extension. The only debugger that appears able to debug XUL/Chrome based extensions is Venkman which is supported in Firefox until version 32 included. The step by step debug has been verified to work with Firefox 32 and Selenium IDE 2.9.0.

Format¶

Format, under the Options menu, allows you to select a language for saving and displaying the test case. The default is HTML.

If you will be using Selenium-RC to run your test cases, this feature is used to translate your test case into a programming language. Select the language, e.g. Java, PHP, you will be using with Selenium-RC for developing your test programs. Then simply save the test case using File=>Export Test Case As. Your test case will be translated into a series of functions in the language you choose. Essentially, program code supporting your test is generated for you by Selenium-IDE.

Also, note that if the generated code does not suit your needs, you can alter it by editing a configuration file which defines the generation process. Each supported language has configuration settings which are editable. This is under the Options=>Options=>Formats tab.

Note

At the time of this writing, this feature is not yet supported by the Selenium developers. However the author has altered the C# format in a limited manner and it has worked well.

Executing Selenium-IDE Tests on Different Browsers¶

While Selenium-IDE can only run tests against Firefox, tests developed with Selenium-IDE can be run against other browsers, using a simple command-line interface that invokes the Selenium-RC server. This topic is covered in the Run Selenese tests section on Selenium-RC chapter. The -htmlSuite command-line option is the particular feature of interest.

Troubleshooting¶

Below is a list of image/explanation pairs which describe frequent sources of problems with Selenium-IDE:

Table view is not available with this format.

This message can be occasionally displayed in the Table tab when Selenium IDE is launched. The workaround is to close and reopen Selenium IDE. See issue 1008. for more information. If you are able to reproduce this reliably then please provide details so that we can work on a fix.

error loading test case: no command found

You’ve used File=>Open to try to open a test suite file. Use File=>Open Test Suite instead.

An enhancement request has been raised to improve this error message. See issue 1010.

This type of error may indicate a timing problem, i.e., the element specified by a locator in your command wasn’t fully loaded when the command was executed. Try putting a pause 5000 before the command to determine whether the problem is indeed related to timing. If so, investigate using an appropriate waitFor* or *AndWait command before the failing command.

Whenever your attempt to use variable substitution fails as is the case for the open command above, it indicates that you haven’t actually created the variable whose value you’re trying to access. This is sometimes due to putting the variable in the Value field when it should be in the Target field or vice versa. In the example above, the two parameters for the store command have been erroneously placed in the reverse order of what is required. For any Selenese command, the first required parameter must go in the Target field, and the second required parameter (if one exists) must go in the Value field.

error loading test case: [Exception... “Component returned failure code: 0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND) [nsIFileInputStream.init]” nresult: “0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)” location: “JS frame :: chrome://selenium-ide/content/file-utils.js :: anonymous :: line 48” data: no]

One of the test cases in your test suite cannot be found. Make sure that the test case is indeed located where the test suite indicates it is located. Also, make sure that your actual test case files have the .html extension both in their filenames, and in the test suite file where they are referenced.

An enhancement request has been raised to improve this error message. See issue 1011.

Your extension file’s contents have not been read by Selenium-IDE. Be sure you have specified the proper pathname to the extensions file via Options=>Options=>General in the Selenium Core extensions field. Also, Selenium-IDE must be restarted after any change to either an extensions file or to the contents of the Selenium Core extensions field.

02_selenium_ide.jsp

Selenium-IDE¶

Introduction¶

This chapter is all about the Selenium IDE and how to use it effectively.

Installing the IDE¶

Using Firefox, first, download the IDE from the SeleniumHQ downloads page

Firefox will protect you from installing addons from unfamiliar locations, so you will need to click ‘Allow’ to proceed with the installation, as shown in the following screenshot.

When downloading from Firefox, you’ll be presented with the following window.

Select Install Now. The Firefox Add-ons window pops up, first showing a progress bar, and when the download is complete, displays the following.

Restart Firefox. After Firefox reboots you will find the Selenium-IDE listed under the Firefox Tools menu.

Opening the IDE¶

To run the Selenium-IDE, simply select it from the Firefox Tools menu. It opens as follows with an empty script-editing window and a menu for loading, or creating new test cases.

IDE Features¶

Menu Bar¶

Toolbar¶

Speed Control: controls how fast your test case runs.

Run All: Runs the entire test suite when a test suite with multiple test cases is loaded.

Run: Runs the currently selected test. When only a single test is loaded this button and the Run All button have the same effect.

Pause/Resume: Allows stopping and re-starting of a running test case.

Step: Allows you to “step” through a test case by running it one command at a time. Use for debugging test cases.

Record: Records the user’s browser actions.

Test Case Pane¶

Your script is displayed in the test case pane. It has two tabs, one for displaying the command and their parameters in a readable “table” format.

If you start typing in the Command field, a drop-down list will be populated based on the first characters you type; you can then select your desired command from the drop-down.

Log/Reference/UI-Element/Rollup Pane¶

The bottom pane is used for four different functions–Log, Reference, UI-Element, and Rollup–depending on which tab is selected.

Log¶

Reference¶

While the Reference tab is invaluable as a quick reference, it is still often necessary to consult the Selenium Reference document.

UI-Element and Rollup¶

Detailed information on these two panes (which cover advanced features) can be found in the UI-Element Documentation on the Help menu of Selenium-IDE.

Building Test Cases¶

There are three primary methods for developing test cases. Frequently, a test developer will require all three techniques.

Recording¶

During recording, Selenium-IDE will automatically insert commands into your test case based on your actions. Typically, this will include:

clicking a link - click or clickAndWait commands
entering values - type command
selecting options from a drop-down listbox - select command
clicking checkboxes or radio buttons - click command

Here are some “gotchas” to be aware of:

The type command may require clicking on some other area of the web page for it to record.
Following a link usually records a click command. You will often need to change this to clickAndWait to ensure your test case pauses until the new page is completely loaded. Otherwise, your test case will continue running commands before the page has loaded all its UI elements. This will cause unexpected test case failures.

Adding Verifications and Asserts With the Context Menu¶

With Selenium-IDE recording, go to the browser displaying your test application and right click anywhere on the page. You will see a context menu showing verify and/or assert commands.

Also, notice the Show All Available Commands menu option. This shows many, many more commands, again, along with suggested parameters, for testing your currently selected UI element.

Editing¶

Insert Command¶

Table View¶

Source View¶

<tr>

<td>Command</td>

<td>target (locator)</td>

<td>Value</td>

</tr>

Insert Comment¶

Comments may be added to make your test case more readable. These comments are ignored when the test case is run.

Table View¶

Select the line in your test case where you want to insert the comment. Right-click and select Insert Comment. Now use the Command field to enter the comment. Your comment will appear in purple text.

Source View¶

Select the point in your test case where you want to insert the comment. Add an HTML-style comment, i.e., .

Edit a Command or Comment¶

Table View¶

Simply select the line to be changed and edit it using the Command, Target, and Value fields.

Source View¶

Since Source view provides the equivalent of a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor, simply modify which line you wish–command, parameter, or comment.

Opening and Saving a Test Case¶

When you open an existing test case or suite, Selenium-IDE displays its Selenium commands in the Test Case Pane.

Running Test Cases¶

Run a Test Case

Click the Run button to run the currently displayed test case.

Run a Test Suite

Click the Run All button to run all the test cases in the currently loaded test suite.

Stop and Start

The Pause button can be used to stop the test case while it is running. The icon of this button then changes to indicate the Resume button. To continue click Resume.

Stop in the Middle

Start from the Middle

Run Any Single Command

Using Base URL to Run Test Cases in Different Domains¶

This same test case with a modified Base URL setting would be run against http://beta.news.portal.com/about.html:

Selenium Commands – “Selenese”¶

A command 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.

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]

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.

Locators, text patterns, selenium variables, and the commands themselves are described in considerable detail in the section on Selenium Commands.

<table>

<tr><td>open</td><td>/download/</td><td></td></tr>

<tr><td>assertTitle</td><td></td><td>Downloads</td></tr>

<tr><td>verifyText</td><td>//h2</td><td>Downloads</td></tr>

</table>

Rendered as a table in a browser this would look like the following:

open	/download/
assertTitle		Downloads
verifyText	//h2	Downloads

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.

<html>

<head>

<title>Test Suite Function Tests - Priority 1</title>

</head>

<body>

<table>

<tr><td><b>Suite Of Tests</b></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./Login.html">Login</a></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./SearchValues.html">Test Searching for Values</a></td></tr>

</table>

</body>

</html>

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

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 its 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.

Verifying Page Elements¶

For example, will you test that...

an element is present somewhere on the page?
specific text is somewhere on the page?
specific text is at a specific location on the page?

Assertion or Verification?¶

The best use of this feature is to logically group your test commands, and start each group with an “assert” followed by one or more “verify” test commands. An example follows:

Command	Target	Value
open	/download/
assertTitle	Downloads
verifyText	//h2	Downloads
assertTable	1.2.1	Selenium IDE
verifyTable	1.2.2	June 3, 2008
verifyTable	1.2.3	1.0 beta 2

verifyTextPresent¶

The command verifyTextPresent is used to verify specific text exists somewhere on the page. It takes a single argument–the text pattern to be verified. For example:

Command	Target	Value
verifyTextPresent	Marketing Analysis

verifyElementPresent¶

Command	Target	Value
verifyElementPresent	//div/p/img

verifyElementPresent can be used to check the existence of any HTML tag within the page. You can check the existence of links, paragraphs, divisions <div>, etc. Here are a few more examples.

Command	Target	Value
verifyElementPresent	//div/p
verifyElementPresent	//div/a
verifyElementPresent	id=Login
verifyElementPresent	link=Go to Marketing Research
verifyElementPresent	//a[2]
verifyElementPresent	//head/title

These examples illustrate the variety of ways a UI element may be tested. Again, locators are explained in the next section.

verifyText¶

Command	Target	Value
verifyText	//table/tr/td/div/p	This is my text and it occurs right after the div inside the table.

Locating Elements¶

Locating by Identifier¶

For instance, your page source could have id and name attributes as follows:

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

The following locator strategies would return the elements from the HTML snippet above indicated by line number:

identifier=loginForm (3)
identifier=password (5)
identifier=continue (6)
continue (6)

Since the identifier type of locator is the default, the identifier= in the first three examples above is not necessary.

Locating by Id¶

This type of locator is more limited than the identifier locator type, but also more explicit. Use this when you know an element’s id attribute.

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

id=loginForm (3)

Locating by Name¶

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

name=username (4)
name=continue value=Clear (7)
name=continue Clear (7)
name=continue type=button (7)

Note

Locating by XPath¶

Since only xpath locators start with “//”, it is not necessary to include the xpath= label when specifying an XPath locator.

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

xpath=/html/body/form[1] (3) - Absolute path (would break if the HTML was changed only slightly)
//form[1] (3) - First form element in the HTML
xpath=//form[@id='loginForm'] (3) - The form element with attribute named ‘id’ and the value ‘loginForm’
xpath=//form[input/@name='username'] (3) - First form element with an input child element with attribute named ‘name’ and the value ‘username’
//input[@name='username'] (4) - First input element with attribute named ‘name’ and the value ‘username’
//form[@id='loginForm']/input[1] (4) - First input child element of the form element with attribute named ‘id’ and the value ‘loginForm’
//input[@name='continue'][@type='button'] (7) - Input with attribute named ‘name’ and the value ‘continue’ and attribute named ‘type’ and the value ‘button’
//form[@id='loginForm']/input[4] (7) - Fourth input child element of the form element with attribute named ‘id’ and value ‘loginForm’

These examples cover some basics, but in order to learn more, the following references are recommended:

There are also a couple of very useful Firefox Add-ons that can assist in discovering the XPath of an element:

XPath Checker - suggests XPath and can be used to test XPath results.
Firebug - XPath suggestions are just one of the many powerful features of this very useful add-on.

Locating Hyperlinks by Link Text¶

This is a simple method of locating a hyperlink in your web page by using the text of the link. If two links with the same text are present, then the first match will be used.

<html>

<body>

<a href="continue.html">Continue</a>

<a href="cancel.html">Cancel</a>

</body>

<html>

link=Continue (4)
link=Cancel (5)

Locating by DOM¶

Since only dom locators start with “document”, it is not necessary to include the dom= label when specifying a DOM locator.

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

dom=document.getElementById('loginForm') (3)
dom=document.forms['loginForm'] (3)
dom=document.forms[0] (3)
document.forms[0].username (4)
document.forms[0].elements['username'] (4)
document.forms[0].elements[0] (4)
document.forms[0].elements[3] (7)

You can use Selenium itself as well as other sites and extensions to explore the DOM of your web application. A good reference exists on W3Schools.

Locating by CSS¶

<html>

<body>

</form>

</body>

<html>

css=form#loginForm (3)
css=input[name="username"] (4)
css=input.required[type="text"] (4)
css=input.passfield (5)
css=#loginForm input[type="button"] (7)
css=#loginForm input:nth-child(2) (5)

For more information about CSS Selectors, the best place to go is the W3C publication. You’ll find additional references there.

Note

Most experienced Selenium users recommend CSS as their locating strategy of choice as it’s considerably faster than XPath and can find the most complicated objects in an intrinsic HTML document.

Implicit Locators¶

You can choose to omit the locator type in the following situations:

Locators without an explicitly defined locator strategy will default to using the identifier locator strategy. See Locating by Identifier.
Locators starting with “//” will use the XPath locator strategy. See Locating by XPath.
Locators starting with “document” will use the DOM locator strategy. See Locating by DOM

Matching Text Patterns¶

There are three types of patterns: globbing, regular expressions, and exact.

Globbing Patterns¶

* which translates to “match anything,” i.e., nothing, a single character, or many characters.

[aeiou] matches any lowercase vowel

[0-9] matches any digit

[a-zA-Z0-9] matches any alphanumeric character

In most other contexts, globbing includes a third special character, the ?. However, Selenium globbing patterns only support the asterisk and character class.

Command	Target	Value
click	link=glob:Film*Television Department
verifyTitle	glob:FilmTelevision*

Regular Expression Patterns¶

PATTERN	MATCH
.	any single character
[ ]	character class: any single character that appears inside the brackets
*	quantifier: 0 or more of the preceding character (or group)
+	quantifier: 1 or more of the preceding character (or group)
?	quantifier: 0 or 1 of the preceding character (or group)
{1,5}	quantifier: 1 through 5 of the preceding character (or group)
\|	alternation: the character/group on the left or the character/group on the right
( )	grouping: often used with alternation and/or quantifier

Regular expression patterns in Selenese need to be prefixed with either regexp: or regexpi:. The former is case-sensitive; the latter is case-insensitive.

Command	Target	Value
click	link=regexp:Film.*Television Department
verifyTitle	regexp:.Film.Television.*

The more complex example below tests that the Yahoo! Weather page for Anchorage, Alaska contains info on the sunrise time:

Command	Target	Value
open	http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/USAK0012.html
verifyTextPresent	regexp:Sunrise: *[0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{2} [ap]m

Let’s examine the regular expression above one part at a time:

Sunrise: *	The string Sunrise: followed by 0 or more spaces
[0-9]{1,2}	1 or 2 digits (for the hour of the day)
:	The character : (no special characters involved)
[0-9]{2}	2 digits (for the minutes) followed by a space
[ap]m	“a” or “p” followed by “m” (am or pm)

Exact Patterns¶

select

//select

glob:Real *

In order to ensure that the “Real *” item would be selected, the exact: prefix could be used to create an exact pattern as shown below:

select

//select

exact:Real *

But the same effect could be achieved via escaping the asterisk in a regular expression pattern:

select

//select

regexp:Real \*

The “AndWait” Commands¶

The AndWait alternative is always used when the action causes the browser to navigate to another page or reload the present one.

The waitFor Commands in AJAX applications¶

Sequence of Evaluation and Flow Control¶

When a script runs, it simply runs in sequence, one command after another.

When flow control is needed, there are three options:

Run the script using Selenium-RC and a client library such as Java or PHP to utilize the programming language’s flow control features.
Run a small JavaScript snippet from within the script using the storeEval command.
Install the goto_sel_ide.js extension.

Store Commands and Selenium Variables¶

Command	Target	Value
store	paul@mysite.org	userName

Command	Target	Value
verifyText	//div/p	${userName}

A common use of variables is for storing input for an input field.

Command	Target	Value
type	id=login	${userName}

An equivalent store command exists for each verify and assert command. Here are a couple more commonly used 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¶

JavaScript and Selenese Parameters¶

JavaScript Usage with Script Parameters¶

The example below illustrates how a JavaScript snippet can be used to perform a simple numerical calculation:

Command	Target	Value
store	10	hits
storeXpathCount	//blockquote	blockquotes
storeEval	storedVars[‘hits’]-storedVars[‘blockquotes’]	paragraphs

This next example illustrates how a JavaScript snippet can include calls to methods, in this case the JavaScript String object’s toUpperCase method and toLowerCase method.

Command	Target	Value
store	Edith Wharton	name
storeEval	storedVars[‘name’].toUpperCase()	uc
storeEval	storedVars[‘name’].toLowerCase()	lc

JavaScript Usage with Non-Script Parameters¶

Command	Target	Value
store	league of nations	searchString
type	q	javascript{storedVars[‘searchString’].toUpperCase()}

echo - The Selenese Print Command¶

Alerts, Popups, and Multiple Windows¶

Suppose that you are testing a page that looks like this.

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

<html>

<head>

function output(resultText){

document.getElementById('output').childNodes[0].nodeValue=resultText;

}

function show_confirm(){

var confirmation=confirm("Chose an option.");

if (confirmation==true){

output("Confirmed.");

}

else{

output("Rejected!");

}

function show_alert(){

alert("I'm blocking!");

output("Alert is gone.");

}

function show_prompt(){

var response = prompt("What's the best web QA tool?","Selenium");

output(response);

}

function open_window(windowName){

window.open("newWindow.html",windowName);

}

</script>

</head>

<body>

<a href="newWindow.html" id="lnkNewWindow" target="_blank">New Window Link</a>

<br />

</span>

</body>

</html>

The user must respond to alert/confirm boxes, as well as moving focus to newly opened popup windows. Fortunately, Selenium can cover JavaScript pop-ups.

Command	Description
assertFoo(pattern)	throws error if pattern doesn’t match the text of the pop-up
assertFooPresent	throws error if pop-up is not available
assertFooNotPresent	throws error if any pop-up is present
storeFoo(variable)	stores the text of the pop-up in a variable
storeFooPresent(variable)	stores the text of the pop-up in a variable and returns true or false

Alerts¶

Command	Target	Value
open	/
click	btnAlert
assertAlert	I’m blocking!
verifyTextPresent	Alert is gone.

Confirmations¶

Command	Target	Value
open	/
click	btnConfirm
chooseCancelOnNextConfirmation
assertConfirmation	Choose an option.
verifyTextPresent	Rejected

The chooseCancelOnNextConfirmation function tells Selenium that all following confirmation should return false. It can be reset by calling chooseOkOnNextConfirmation.

Prompts¶

Command	Target	Value
open	/
answerOnNextPrompt	Selenium!
click	id=btnPrompt
assertPrompt	What’s the best web QA tool?
verifyTextPresent	Selenium!

If you choose cancel on the prompt, you may notice that answerOnNextPrompt will simply show a target of blank. Selenium treats cancel and a blank entry on the prompt basically as the same thing.

Debugging¶

Debugging means finding and fixing errors in your test case. This is a normal part of test case development.

Breakpoints and Startpoints¶

To set a breakpoint, select a command, right-click, and from the context menu select Toggle Breakpoint. Then click the Run button to run your test case from the beginning up to the breakpoint.

To set a startpoint, select a command, right-click, and from the context menu select Set/Clear Start Point. Then click the Run button to execute the test case beginning at that startpoint.

Stepping Through a Testcase¶

To execute a test case one command at a time (“step through” it), follow these steps:

Start the test case running with the Run button from the toolbar.

Immediately pause the executing test case with the Pause button.

Repeatedly select the Step button.

Find Button¶

Page Source for Debugging¶

Locator Assistance¶

Writing a Test Suite¶

Selenium-IDE also supports loading pre-existing test cases by using the File -> Add Test Case menu option. This allows you to add existing test cases to a new test suite.

<html>

<head>

<title>Sample Selenium Test Suite</title>

</head>

<body>

<thead>

<tr><td>Test Cases for De Anza A-Z Directory Links</td></tr>

</thead>

<tbody>

<tr><td><a href="./a.html">A Links</a></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./b.html">B Links</a></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./c.html">C Links</a></td></tr>

<tr><td><a href="./d.html">D Links</a></td></tr>

</tbody>

</table>

</body>

</html>

Note

User Extensions¶

There are a number of useful extensions created by users.

IMPORTANT: THIS SECTION IS OUT OF DATE–WE WILL BE REVISING THIS SOON.

To install this extension, put the pathname to its location on your computer in the Selenium Core extensions field of Selenium-IDE’s Options=>Options=>General tab.

Information on writing your own extensions can be found near the bottom of the Selenium Reference document.

Format¶

Format, under the Options menu, allows you to select a language for saving and displaying the test case. The default is HTML.

Note

At the time of this writing, this feature is not yet supported by the Selenium developers. However the author has altered the C# format in a limited manner and it has worked well.

Executing Selenium-IDE Tests on Different Browsers¶

Troubleshooting¶

Below is a list of image/explanation pairs which describe frequent sources of problems with Selenium-IDE:

Table view is not available with this format.

error loading test case: no command found

You’ve used File=>Open to try to open a test suite file. Use File=>Open Test Suite instead.

An enhancement request has been raised to improve this error message. See issue 1010.

An enhancement request has been raised to improve this error message. See issue 1011.

03_webdriver.jsp

Selenium WebDriver¶

NOTE: We’re currently working on documenting these sections. We believe the information here is accurate, however be aware we are also still working on this chapter. Additional information will be provided as we go which should make this chapter more solid.

Introducing WebDriver¶

The primary new feature in Selenium 2.0 is the integration of the WebDriver API. WebDriver is designed to provide a simpler, more concise programming interface in addition to addressing some limitations in the Selenium-RC API. Selenium-WebDriver was developed to better support dynamic web pages where elements of a page may change without the page itself being reloaded. WebDriver’s goal is to supply a well-designed object-oriented API that provides improved support for modern advanced web-app testing problems.

How Does WebDriver ‘Drive’ the Browser Compared to Selenium-RC?¶

Selenium-WebDriver makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation. How these direct calls are made, and the features they support depends on the browser you are using. Information on each ‘browser driver’ is provided later in this chapter.

For those familiar with Selenium-RC, this is quite different from what you are used to. Selenium-RC worked the same way for each supported browser. It ‘injected’ javascript functions into the browser when the browser was loaded and then used its javascript to drive the AUT within the browser. WebDriver does not use this technique. Again, it drives the browser directly using the browser’s built in support for automation.

WebDriver and the Selenium-Server¶

You may, or may not, need the Selenium Server, depending on how you intend to use Selenium-WebDriver. If you will be only using the WebDriver API you do not need the Selenium-Server. If your browser and tests will all run on the same machine, and your tests only use the WebDriver API, then you do not need to run the Selenium-Server; WebDriver will run the browser directly.

There are some reasons though to use the Selenium-Server with Selenium-WebDriver.

You are using Selenium-Grid to distribute your tests over multiple machines or virtual machines (VMs).
You want to connect to a remote machine that has a particular browser version that is not on your current machine.
You are not using the Java bindings (i.e. Python, C#, or Ruby) and would like to use HtmlUnit Driver

Setting Up a Selenium-WebDriver Project¶

To install Selenium means to set up a project in a development so you can write a program using Selenium. How you do this depends on your programming language and your development environment.

Java¶

The easiest way to set up a Selenium 2.0 Java project is to use Maven. Maven will download the java bindings (the Selenium 2.0 java client library) and all its dependencies, and will create the project for you, using a maven pom.xml (project configuration) file. Once you’ve done this, you can import the maven project into your preferred IDE, IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse.

First, create a folder to contain your Selenium project files. Then, to use Maven, you need a pom.xml file. This can be created with a text editor. We won’t teach the details of pom.xml files or for using Maven since there are already excellent references on this. Your pom.xml file will look something like this. Create this file in the folder you created for your project.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"

xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">

<groupId>MySel20Proj</groupId>

<artifactId>MySel20Proj</artifactId>

<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>

<artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>

</dependency>

<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>

<artifactId>htmlunit-driver</artifactId>

</dependency>

</dependencies>

</project>

Be sure you specify the most current version. At the time of writing, the version listed above was the most current, however there were frequent releases immediately after the release of Selenium 2.0. Check the Maven download page for the current release and edit the above dependency accordingly.

Now, from a command-line, CD into the project directory and run maven as follows.

mvn clean install

This will download Selenium and all its dependencies and will add them to the project.

Finally, import the project into your preferred development environment. For those not familiar with this, we’ve provided an appendix which shows this.

Importing a maven project into IntelliJ IDEA. Importing a maven project into Eclipse.

C#¶

As of Selenium 2.2.0, the C# bindings are distributed as a set of signed dlls along with other dependency dlls. Prior to 2.2.0, all Selenium dll’s were unsigned. To include Selenium in your project, simply download the latest selenium-dotnet zip file from http://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/index.html. If you are using Windows Vista or above, you should unblock the zip file before unzipping it: Right click on the zip file, click “Properties”, click “Unblock” and click “OK”.

Unzip the contents of the zip file, and add a reference to each of the unzipped dlls to your project in Visual Studio (or your IDE of choice).

Official NuGet Packages: RC WebDriver WebDriverBackedSelenium Support

Python¶

If you are using Python for test automation then you probably are already familiar with developing in Python. To add Selenium to your Python environment run the following command from a command-line.

pip install selenium

Pip requires pip to be installed, pip also has a dependency on setuptools.

Teaching Python development itself is beyond the scope of this document, however there are many resources on Python and likely developers in your organization can help you get up to speed.

Ruby¶

If you are using Ruby for test automation then you probably are already familiar with developing in Ruby. To add Selenium to your Ruby environment run the following command from a command-line.

gem install selenium-webdriver

Teaching Ruby development itself is beyond the scope of this document, however there are many resources on Ruby and likely developers in your organization can help you get up to speed.

Perl¶

Perl bindings are provided by a third party, please refer to any of their documentation on how to install / get started. There is one known Perl binding as of this writing.

PHP¶

PHP bindings are provided by a third party, please refer to any of their documentation on how to install / get started. There are three known bindings at this time: By Chibimagic By Lukasz Kolczynski and By the Facebook

Migrating from Selenium 1.0¶

For those who already have test suites written using Selenium 1.0, we have provided tips on how to migrate your existing code to Selenium 2.0. Simon Stewart, the lead developer for Selenium 2.0, has written an article on migrating from Selenium 1.0. We’ve included this as an appendix.

Migrating From Selenium RC to Selenium WebDriver

Introducing the Selenium-WebDriver API by Example¶

WebDriver is a tool for automating web application testing, and in particular to verify that they work as expected. It aims to provide a friendly API that’s easy to explore and understand, easier to use than the Selenium-RC (1.0) API, which will help to make your tests easier to read and maintain. It’s not tied to any particular test framework, so it can be used equally well in a unit testing or from a plain old “main” method. This section introduces WebDriver’s API and helps get you started becoming familiar with it. Start by setting up a WebDriver project if you haven’t already. This was described in the previous section, Setting Up a Selenium-WebDriver Project.

Once your project is set up, you can see that WebDriver acts just as any normal library: it is entirely self-contained, and you usually don’t need to remember to start any additional processes or run any installers before using it, as opposed to the proxy server with Selenium-RC.

Note: additional steps are required to use ChromeDriver, Opera Driver, Android Driver and iOS Driver

You’re now ready to write some code. An easy way to get started is this example, which searches for the term “Cheese” on Google and then outputs the result page’s title to the console.

package org.openqa.selenium.example;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;

import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedCondition;

import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait;

public class Selenium2Example {

public static void main(String[] args) {

// Create a new instance of the Firefox driver

// Notice that the remainder of the code relies on the interface,

// not the implementation.

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

// And now use this to visit Google

driver.get("http://www.google.com");

// Alternatively the same thing can be done like this

// driver.navigate().to("http://www.google.com");

// Find the text input element by its name

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));

// Enter something to search for

element.sendKeys("Cheese!");

// Now submit the form. WebDriver will find the form for us from the element

element.submit();

// Check the title of the page

System.out.println("Page title is: " + driver.getTitle());

// Google's search is rendered dynamically with JavaScript.

// Wait for the page to load, timeout after 10 seconds

(new WebDriverWait(driver, 10)).until(new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {

public Boolean apply(WebDriver d) {

return d.getTitle().toLowerCase().startsWith("cheese!");

}

});

// Should see: "cheese! - Google Search"

System.out.println("Page title is: " + driver.getTitle());

//Close the browser

driver.quit();

}

In upcoming sections, you will learn more about how to use WebDriver for things such as navigating forward and backward in your browser’s history, and how to test web sites that use frames and windows. We also provide a more thorough discussions and examples.

Selenium-WebDriver API Commands and Operations¶

Fetching a Page¶

The first thing you’re likely to want to do with WebDriver is navigate to a page. The normal way to do this is by calling “get”:

driver.get("http://www.google.com");

Dependent on several factors, including the OS/Browser combination, WebDriver may or may not wait for the page to load. In some circumstances, WebDriver may return control before the page has finished, or even started, loading. To ensure robustness, you need to wait for the element(s) to exist in the page using Explicit and Implicit Waits.

Locating UI Elements (WebElements)¶

Locating elements in WebDriver can be done on the WebDriver instance itself or on a WebElement. Each of the language bindings expose a “Find Element” and “Find Elements” method. The first returns a WebElement object otherwise it throws an exception. The latter returns a list of WebElements, it can return an empty list if no DOM elements match the query.

The “Find” methods take a locator or query object called “By”. “By” strategies are listed below.

By ID¶

This is the most efficient and preferred way to locate an element. Common pitfalls that UI developers make is having non-unique id’s on a page or auto-generating the id, both should be avoided. A class on an html element is more appropriate than an auto-generated id.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("coolestWidgetEvah"));

By Class Name¶

“Class” in this case refers to the attribute on the DOM element. Often in practical use there are many DOM elements with the same class name, thus finding multiple elements becomes the more practical option over finding the first element.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<div class="cheese"><span>Cheddar</span></div><div class="cheese"><span>Gouda</span></div>

List<WebElement> cheeses = driver.findElements(By.className("cheese"));

By Tag Name¶

The DOM Tag Name of the element.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

WebElement frame = driver.findElement(By.tagName("iframe"));

By Name¶

Find the input element with matching name attribute.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

WebElement cheese = driver.findElement(By.name("cheese"));

By Link Text¶

Find the link element with matching visible text.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=cheese">cheese</a>>

WebElement cheese = driver.findElement(By.linkText("cheese"));

By Partial Link Text¶

Find the link element with partial matching visible text.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=cheese">search for cheese</a>>

WebElement cheese = driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("cheese"));

By CSS¶

Like the name implies it is a locator strategy by css. Native browser support is used by default, so please refer to w3c css selectors for a list of generally available css selectors. If a browser does not have native support for css queries, then Sizzle is used. IE 6,7 and FF3.0 currently use Sizzle as the css query engine.

Beware that not all browsers were created equal, some css that might work in one version may not work in another.

Example of to find the cheese below:

<div id="food"><span class="dairy">milk</span><span class="dairy aged">cheese</span></div>

WebElement cheese = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#food span.dairy.aged"));

By XPATH¶

At a high level, WebDriver uses a browser’s native XPath capabilities wherever possible. On those browsers that don’t have native XPath support, we have provided our own implementation. This can lead to some unexpected behaviour unless you are aware of the differences in the various xpath engines.

Driver	Tag and Attribute Name	Attribute Values	Native XPath Support
HtmlUnit Driver	Lower-cased	As they appear in the HTML	Yes
Internet Explorer Driver	Lower-cased	As they appear in the HTML	No
Firefox Driver	Case insensitive	As they appear in the HTML	Yes

This is a little abstract, so for the following piece of HTML:

List<WebElement> inputs = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//input"));

The following number of matches will be found

XPath expression	HtmlUnit Driver	Firefox Driver	Internet Explorer Driver
//input	1 (“example”)	2	2
//INPUT	0	2	0

Sometimes HTML elements do not need attributes to be explicitly declared because they will default to known values. For example, the “input” tag does not require the “type” attribute because it defaults to “text”. The rule of thumb when using xpath in WebDriver is that you should not expect to be able to match against these implicit attributes.

Using JavaScript¶

You can execute arbitrary javascript to find an element and as long as you return a DOM Element, it will be automatically converted to a WebElement object.

Simple example on a page that has jQuery loaded:

WebElement element = (WebElement) ((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("return $('.cheese')[0]");

Finding all the input elements to the every label on a page:

List<WebElement> labels = driver.findElements(By.tagName("label"));

List<WebElement> inputs = (List<WebElement>) ((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript(

"var labels = arguments[0], inputs = []; for (var i=0; i < labels.length; i++){" +

"inputs.push(document.getElementById(labels[i].getAttribute('for'))); } return inputs;", labels);

User Input - Filling In Forms¶

We’ve already seen how to enter text into a textarea or text field, but what about the other elements? You can “toggle” the state of checkboxes, and you can use “click” to set something like an OPTION tag selected. Dealing with SELECT tags isn’t too bad:

WebElement select = driver.findElement(By.tagName("select"));

List<WebElement> allOptions = select.findElements(By.tagName("option"));

for (WebElement option : allOptions) {

System.out.println(String.format("Value is: %s", option.getAttribute("value")));

option.click();

}

This will find the first “SELECT” element on the page, and cycle through each of its OPTIONs in turn, printing out their values, and selecting each in turn. As you will notice, this isn’t the most efficient way of dealing with SELECT elements. WebDriver’s support classes include one called “Select”, which provides useful methods for interacting with these.

Select select = new Select(driver.findElement(By.tagName("select")));

select.deselectAll();

select.selectByVisibleText("Edam");

This will deselect all OPTIONs from the first SELECT on the page, and then select the OPTION with the displayed text of “Edam”.

Once you’ve finished filling out the form, you probably want to submit it. One way to do this would be to find the “submit” button and click it:

driver.findElement(By.id("submit")).click();

Alternatively, WebDriver has the convenience method “submit” on every element. If you call this on an element within a form, WebDriver will walk up the DOM until it finds the enclosing form and then calls submit on that. If the element isn’t in a form, then the NoSuchElementException will be thrown:

element.submit();

Moving Between Windows and Frames¶

Some web applications have many frames or multiple windows. WebDriver supports moving between named windows using the “switchTo” method:

driver.switchTo().window("windowName");

All calls to driver will now be interpreted as being directed to the particular window. But how do you know the window’s name? Take a look at the javascript or link that opened it:

<a href="somewhere.html" target="windowName">Click here to open a new window</a>

Alternatively, you can pass a “window handle” to the “switchTo().window()” method. Knowing this, it’s possible to iterate over every open window like so:

for (String handle : driver.getWindowHandles()) {

driver.switchTo().window(handle);

}

You can also switch from frame to frame (or into iframes):

driver.switchTo().frame("frameName");

Popup Dialogs¶

Starting with Selenium 2.0 beta 1, there is built in support for handling popup dialog boxes. After you’ve triggered an action that opens a popup, you can access the alert with the following:

Alert alert = driver.switchTo().alert();

This will return the currently open alert object. With this object you can now accept, dismiss, read its contents or even type into a prompt. This interface works equally well on alerts, confirms, and prompts. Refer to the JavaDocs or RubyDocs for more information.

Navigation: History and Location¶

Earlier, we covered navigating to a page using the “get” command ( driver.get("http://www.example.com")) As you’ve seen, WebDriver has a number of smaller, task-focused interfaces, and navigation is a useful task. Because loading a page is such a fundamental requirement, the method to do this lives on the main WebDriver interface, but it’s simply a synonym to:

driver.navigate().to("http://www.example.com");

To reiterate: “navigate().to()” and “get()” do exactly the same thing. One’s just a lot easier to type than the other!

The “navigate” interface also exposes the ability to move backwards and forwards in your browser’s history:

driver.navigate().forward();

driver.navigate().back();

Please be aware that this functionality depends entirely on the underlying browser. It’s just possible that something unexpected may happen when you call these methods if you’re used to the behaviour of one browser over another.

Cookies¶

Before we leave these next steps, you may be interested in understanding how to use cookies. First of all, you need to be on the domain that the cookie will be valid for. If you are trying to preset cookies before you start interacting with a site and your homepage is large / takes a while to load an alternative is to find a smaller page on the site, typically the 404 page is small (http://example.com/some404page)

// Go to the correct domain

driver.get("http://www.example.com");

// Now set the cookie. This one's valid for the entire domain

Cookie cookie = new Cookie("key", "value");

driver.manage().addCookie(cookie);

// And now output all the available cookies for the current URL

Set<Cookie> allCookies = driver.manage().getCookies();

for (Cookie loadedCookie : allCookies) {

System.out.println(String.format("%s -> %s", loadedCookie.getName(), loadedCookie.getValue()));

}

// You can delete cookies in 3 ways

// By name

driver.manage().deleteCookieNamed("CookieName");

// By Cookie

driver.manage().deleteCookie(loadedCookie);

// Or all of them

driver.manage().deleteAllCookies();

Changing the User Agent¶

This is easy with the Firefox Driver:

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();

profile.addAdditionalPreference("general.useragent.override", "some UA string");

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Drag And Drop¶

Here’s an example of using the Actions class to perform a drag and drop. Native events are required to be enabled.

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("source"));

WebElement target = driver.findElement(By.name("target"));

(new Actions(driver)).dragAndDrop(element, target).perform();

Driver Specifics and Tradeoffs¶

Selenium-WebDriver’s Drivers¶

WebDriver is the name of the key interface against which tests should be written, but there are several implementations. These include:

HtmlUnit Driver¶

This is currently the fastest and most lightweight implementation of WebDriver. As the name suggests, this is based on HtmlUnit. HtmlUnit is a java based implementation of a WebBrowser without a GUI. For any language binding (other than java) the Selenium Server is required to use this driver.

Usage¶

WebDriver driver = new HtmlUnitDriver();

Pros¶

Fastest implementation of WebDriver
A pure Java solution and so it is platform independent.
Supports JavaScript
Emulates other browsers’ JavaScript behaviour (see below)

Cons¶

JavaScript in the HtmlUnit Driver¶

None of the popular browsers uses the JavaScript engine used by HtmlUnit (Rhino). If you test JavaScript using HtmlUnit the results may differ significantly from those browsers.

When we say “JavaScript” we actually mean “JavaScript and the DOM”. Although the DOM is defined by the W3C each browser has its own quirks and differences in their implementation of the DOM and in how JavaScript interacts with it. HtmlUnit has an impressively complete implementation of the DOM and has good support for using JavaScript, but it is no different from any other browser: it has its own quirks and differences from both the W3C standard and the DOM implementations of the major browsers, despite its ability to mimic other browsers.

With WebDriver, we had to make a choice; do we enable HtmlUnit’s JavaScript capabilities and run the risk of teams running into problems that only manifest themselves there, or do we leave JavaScript disabled, knowing that there are more and more sites that rely on JavaScript? We took the conservative approach, and by default have disabled support when we use HtmlUnit. With each release of both WebDriver and HtmlUnit, we reassess this decision: we hope to enable JavaScript by default on the HtmlUnit at some point.

Enabling JavaScript¶

If you can’t wait, enabling JavaScript support is very easy:

HtmlUnitDriver driver = new HtmlUnitDriver(true);

This will cause the HtmlUnit Driver to emulate Firefox 3.6’s JavaScript handling by default.

Firefox Driver¶

Controls the Firefox browser using a Firefox plugin. The Firefox Profile that is used is stripped down from what is installed on the machine to only include the Selenium WebDriver.xpi (plugin). A few settings are also changed by default (see the source to see which ones) Firefox Driver is capable of being run and is tested on Windows, Mac, Linux. Currently on versions 3.6, 10, latest - 1, latest

Usage¶

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

Pros¶

Runs in a real browser and supports JavaScript
Faster than the Internet Explorer Driver
Slower than the HtmlUnit Driver

Cons¶

Modifying the Firefox Profile¶

Suppose that you wanted to modify the user agent string (as above), but you’ve got a tricked out Firefox profile that contains dozens of useful extensions. There are two ways to obtain this profile. Assuming that the profile has been created using Firefox’s profile manager (firefox -ProfileManager):

ProfilesIni allProfiles = new ProfilesIni();

FirefoxProfile profile = allProfiles.getProfile("WebDriver");

profile.setPreferences("foo.bar", 23);

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Alternatively, if the profile isn’t already registered with Firefox:

File profileDir = new File("path/to/top/level/of/profile");

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile(profileDir);

profile.addAdditionalPreferences(extraPrefs);

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

As we develop features in the Firefox Driver, we expose the ability to use them. For example, until we feel native events are stable on Firefox for Linux, they are disabled by default. To enable them:

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();

profile.setEnableNativeEvents(true);

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Info¶

See the Firefox section in the wiki page for the most up to date info.

Internet Explorer Driver¶

The InternetExplorerDriver is a standalone server which implements WebDriver’s wire protocol. This driver has been tested with IE 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 on appropriate combinations of Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. As of 15 April 2014, IE 6 is no longer supported.

The driver supports running 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the browser. The choice of how to determine which “bit-ness” to use in launching the browser depends on which version of the IEDriverServer.exe is launched. If the 32-bit version of IEDriverServer.exe is launched, the 32-bit version of IE will be launched. Similarly, if the 64-bit version of IEDriverServer.exe is launched, the 64-bit version of IE will be launched.

Usage¶

WebDriver driver = new InternetExplorerDriver();

Pros¶

Runs in a real browser and supports Javascript
Obviously the InternetExplorerDriver will only work on Windows!
Comparatively slow (though still pretty snappy!)

Cons¶

Info¶

See the Internet Explorer section of the wiki page for the most up to date info. Please take special note of the Required Configuration section.

ChromeDriver¶

ChromeDriver is maintained / supported by the Chromium project iteslf. WebDriver works with Chrome through the chromedriver binary (found on the chromium project’s download page). You need to have both chromedriver and a version of chrome browser installed. chromedriver needs to be placed somewhere on your system’s path in order for WebDriver to automatically discover it. The Chrome browser itself is discovered by chromedriver in the default installation path. These both can be overridden by environment variables. Please refer to the wiki for more information.

Usage¶

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

Pros¶

Runs in a real browser and supports JavaScript
Because Chrome is a Webkit-based browser, the ChromeDriver may allow you to verify that your site works in Safari. Note that since Chrome uses its own V8 JavaScript engine rather than Safari’s Nitro engine, JavaScript execution may differ.
Slower than the HtmlUnit Driver

Cons¶

Info¶

See our wiki for the most up to date info. More info can also be found on the downloads page

Getting running with ChromeDriver¶

Download the ChromeDriver executable and follow the other instructions on the wiki page

Opera Driver¶

See the Opera Driver wiki article in the Selenium Wiki for information on using the Opera Driver.

iOS Driver¶

See either the ios-driver or appium projects.

Android Driver¶

See the Selendroid project

Alternative Back-Ends: Mixing WebDriver and RC Technologies¶

WebDriver-Backed Selenium-RC¶

The Java version of WebDriver provides an implementation of the Selenium-RC API. These means that you can use the underlying WebDriver technology using the Selenium-RC API. This is primarily provided for backwards compatibility. It allows those who have existing test suites using the Selenium-RC API to use WebDriver under the covers. It’s provided to help ease the migration path to Selenium-WebDriver. Also, this allows one to use both APIs, side-by-side, in the same test code.

Selenium-WebDriver is used like this:

// You may use any WebDriver implementation. Firefox is used here as an example

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

// A "base url", used by selenium to resolve relative URLs

String baseUrl = "http://www.google.com";

// Create the Selenium implementation

Selenium selenium = new WebDriverBackedSelenium(driver, baseUrl);

// Perform actions with selenium

selenium.open("http://www.google.com");

selenium.type("name=q", "cheese");

selenium.click("name=btnG");

// Get the underlying WebDriver implementation back. This will refer to the

// same WebDriver instance as the "driver" variable above.

WebDriver driverInstance = ((WebDriverBackedSelenium) selenium).getWrappedDriver();

//Finally, close the browser. Call stop on the WebDriverBackedSelenium instance

//instead of calling driver.quit(). Otherwise, the JVM will continue running after

//the browser has been closed.

selenium.stop();

Pros¶

Allows for the WebDriver and Selenium APIs to live side-by-side
Provides a simple mechanism for a managed migration from the Selenium RC API to WebDriver’s
Does not require the standalone Selenium RC server to be run
Does not implement every method
More advanced Selenium usage (using “browserbot” or other built-in JavaScript methods from Selenium Core) may not work
Some methods may be slower due to underlying implementation differences

Cons¶

Backing WebDriver with Selenium¶

WebDriver doesn’t support as many browsers as Selenium RC does, so in order to provide that support while still using the WebDriver API, you can make use of the SeleneseCommandExecutor

Safari is supported in this way with the following code (be sure to disable pop-up blocking):

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();

capabilities.setBrowserName("safari");

CommandExecutor executor = new SeleneseCommandExecutor(new URL("http://localhost:4444/"), new URL("http://www.google.com/"), capabilities);

WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(executor, capabilities);

There are currently some major limitations with this approach, notably that findElements doesn’t work as expected. Also, because we’re using Selenium Core for the heavy lifting of driving the browser, you are limited by the JavaScript sandbox.

Running Standalone Selenium Server for use with RemoteDrivers¶

From Selenium’s Download page download selenium-server-standalone-<version>.jar and optionally IEDriverServer. If you plan to work with Chrome, download it from Google Code.

Unpack IEDriverServer and/or chromedriver and put them in a directory which is on the $PATH / %PATH% - the Selenium Server should then be able to handle requests for IE / Chrome without additional modifications.

Start the server on the command line with

java -jar <path_to>/selenium-server-standalone-<version>.jar

If you want to use native events functionality, indicate this on the command line with the option

-Dwebdriver.enable.native.events=1

For other command line options, execute

java -jar <path_to>/selenium-server-standalone-<version>.jar -help

In order to function properly, the following ports should be allowed incoming TCP connections: 4444, 7054-5 (or twice as many ports as the number of concurrent instances you plan to run). Under Windows, you may need to unblock the applications as well.

Additional Resources¶

You can find further resources for WebDriver in WebDriver’s wiki

Of course, don’t hesitate to do an internet search on any Selenium topic, including Selenium-WebDriver’s drivers. There are quite a few blogs on Selenium along with numerous posts on various user forums. Additionally the Selenium User’s Group is a great resource. http://groups.google.com/group/selenium-users

Next Steps¶

This chapter has simply been a high level walkthrough of WebDriver and some of its key capabilities. Once getting familiar with the Selenium-WebDriver API you will then want to learn how to build test suites for maintainability, extensibility, and reduced fragility when features of the AUT frequently change. The approach most Selenium experts are now recommending is to design your test code using the Page Object Design Pattern along with possibly a Page Factory. Selenium-WebDriver provides support for this by supplying a PageFactory class in Java and C#. This is presented, along with other advanced topics, in the next chapter. Also, for high-level description of this technique, you may want to look at the Test Design Considerations chapter. Both of these chapters present techniques for writing more maintainable tests by making your test code more modular.

04_webdriver_advanced.jsp

WebDriver: Advanced Usage¶

Explicit and Implicit Waits¶

Waiting is having the automated task execution elapse a certain amount of time before continuing with the next step. You should choose to use Explicit Waits or Implicit Waits.

WARNING: Do not mix implicit and explicit waits. Doing so can cause unpredictable wait times. For example setting an implicit wait of 10s and an explicit wait of 15 seconds, could cause a timeout to occur after 20 seconds.

Explicit Waits¶

An explicit waits is code you define to wait for a certain condition to occur before proceeding further in the code. The worst case of this is Thread.sleep(), which sets the condition to an exact time period to wait. There are some convenience methods provided that help you write code that will wait only as long as required. WebDriverWait in combination with ExpectedCondition is one way this can be accomplished.

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

driver.get("http://somedomain/url_that_delays_loading");

WebElement myDynamicElement = (new WebDriverWait(driver, 10))

.until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.id("myDynamicElement")));

This waits up to 10 seconds before throwing a TimeoutException or if it finds the element will return it in 0 - 10 seconds. WebDriverWait by default calls the ExpectedCondition every 500 milliseconds until it returns successfully. A successful return is for ExpectedCondition type is Boolean return true or not null return value for all other ExpectedCondition types.

This example is also functionally equivalent to the first Implicit Waits example.

Expected Conditions¶

There are some common conditions that are frequently come across when automating web browsers. Listed below are Implementations of each. Java happens to have convienence methods so you don’t have to code an ExpectedCondition class yourself or create your own utility package for them.

Element is Clickable - it is Displayed and Enabled.

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);

WebElement element = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.id("someid")));

The ExpectedConditions package (Java) (Python) (.NET) contains a set of predefined conditions to use with WebDriverWait.

Implicit Waits¶

An implicit wait is to tell WebDriver to poll the DOM for a certain amount of time when trying to find an element or elements if they are not immediately available. The default setting is 0. Once set, the implicit wait is set for the life of the WebDriver object instance.

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

driver.get("http://somedomain/url_that_delays_loading");

WebElement myDynamicElement = driver.findElement(By.id("myDynamicElement"));

RemoteWebDriver¶

Taking a Screenshot¶

import java.io.File;

import java.net.URL;

import org.openqa.selenium.OutputType;

import org.openqa.selenium.TakesScreenshot;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.remote.Augmenter;

import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;

import org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver;

public class Testing {

public void myTest() throws Exception {

WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(

new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub"),

DesiredCapabilities.firefox());

driver.get("http://www.google.com");

// RemoteWebDriver does not implement the TakesScreenshot class

// if the driver does have the Capabilities to take a screenshot

// then Augmenter will add the TakesScreenshot methods to the instance

WebDriver augmentedDriver = new Augmenter().augment(driver);

File screenshot = ((TakesScreenshot)augmentedDriver).

getScreenshotAs(OutputType.FILE);

}

Using a FirefoxProfile¶

FirefoxProfile fp = new FirefoxProfile();

// set something on the profile...

DesiredCapabilities dc = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();

dc.setCapability(FirefoxDriver.PROFILE, fp);

WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(dc);

Using ChromeOptions¶

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

// set some options

DesiredCapabilities dc = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();

dc.setCapability(ChromeOptions.CAPABILITY, options);

WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(dc);

AdvancedUserInteractions¶

The Actions class(es) allow you to build a Chain of Actions and perform them. There are too many possible combinations to count. Below are a few of the common interactions that you may want to use. For a full list of actions please refer to the API docs Java C# Ruby Python

The Advanced User Interactions require native events to be enabled. Here’s a table of the current support Matrix for native events:

platform	IE6	IE7	IE8	IE9	FF3.6	FF10+	Chrome stable	Chrome beta	Chrome dev	Opera	Android	iOS
Windows XP	Y	Y	Y	n/a	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	?	Y [1]	n/a
Windows 7	n/a	n/a	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	?	Y [1]	n/a
Linux (Ubuntu)	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Y [2]	Y [2]	Y	Y	Y	?	Y [1]	n/a
Mac OSX	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	N	N	Y	Y	Y	?	Y [1]	N
Mobile Device	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	?	n/a	n/a	n/a	?	Y	N

[1]	(1, 2, 3, 4) Using the emulator

[2]	(1, 2) With explicitly enabling native events

Browser Startup Manipulation¶

Todo

Topics to be included:

restoring cookies
changing firefox profile
running browsers with plugins

Using a Proxy¶

Internet Explorer¶

The easiest and recommended way is to manually set the proxy on the machine that will be running the test. If that is not possible or you want your test to run with a different configuration or proxy, then you can use the following technique that uses a Capababilities object. This temporarily changes the system’s proxy settings and changes them back to the original state when done.

String PROXY = "localhost:8080";

org.openqa.selenium.Proxy proxy = new org.openqa.selenium.Proxy();

proxy.setHttpProxy(PROXY)

.setFtpProxy(PROXY)

.setSslProxy(PROXY);

DesiredCapabilities cap = new DesiredCapabilities();

cap.setCapability(CapabilityType.PROXY, proxy);

WebDriver driver = new InternetExplorerDriver(cap);

Chrome¶

Is basically the same as internet explorer. It uses the same configuration on the machine as IE does (on windows). On Mac it uses the System Preference -> Network settings. On Linux it uses (on Ubuntu) System > Preferences > Network Proxy Preferences (Alternatively in “/etc/environment” set http_proxy). As of this writing it is unknown how to set the proxy programmatically.

Firefox¶

Firefox maintains its proxy configuration in a profile. You can preset the proxy in a profile and use that Firefox Profile or you can set it on profile that is created on the fly as is shown in the following example.

String PROXY = "localhost:8080";

org.openqa.selenium.Proxy proxy = new org.openqa.selenium.Proxy();

proxy.setHttpProxy(PROXY)

.setFtpProxy(PROXY)

.setSslProxy(PROXY);

DesiredCapabilities cap = new DesiredCapabilities();

cap.setCapability(CapabilityType.PROXY, proxy);

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(cap);

Opera¶

Todo

HTML5¶

Todo

Parallelizing Your Test Runs¶

Todo

05_selenium_rc.jsp

Selenium 1 (Selenium RC)¶

Introduction¶

As you can read in Brief History of The Selenium Project, Selenium RC was the main Selenium project for a long time, before the WebDriver/Selenium merge brought up Selenium 2, the newest and more powerful tool.

Selenium 1 is still actively supported (mostly in maintenance mode) and provides some features that may not be available in Selenium 2 for a while, including support for several languages (Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and C#) and support for almost every browser out there.

How Selenium RC Works¶

First, we will describe how the components of Selenium RC operate and the role each plays in running your test scripts.

RC Components¶

Selenium RC components are:

The Selenium Server which launches and kills browsers, interprets and runs the Selenese commands passed from the test program, and acts as an HTTP proxy, intercepting and verifying HTTP messages passed between the browser and the AUT.
Client libraries which provide the interface between each programming language and the Selenium RC Server.

Here is a simplified architecture diagram....

The diagram shows the client libraries communicate with the Server passing each Selenium command for execution. Then the server passes the Selenium command to the browser using Selenium-Core JavaScript commands. The browser, using its JavaScript interpreter, executes the Selenium command. This runs the Selenese action or verification you specified in your test script.

Selenium Server¶

Selenium Server receives Selenium commands from your test program, interprets them, and reports back to your program the results of running those tests.

The RC server bundles Selenium Core and automatically injects it into the browser. This occurs when your test program opens the browser (using a client library API function). Selenium-Core is a JavaScript program, actually a set of JavaScript functions which interprets and executes Selenese commands using the browser’s built-in JavaScript interpreter.

The Server receives the Selenese commands from your test program using simple HTTP GET/POST requests. This means you can use any programming language that can send HTTP requests to automate Selenium tests on the browser.

Client Libraries¶

The client libraries provide the programming support that allows you to run Selenium commands from a program of your own design. There is a different client library for each supported language. A Selenium client library provides a programming interface (API), i.e., a set of functions, which run Selenium commands from your own program. Within each interface, there is a programming function that supports each Selenese command.

The client library takes a Selenese command and passes it to the Selenium Server for processing a specific action or test against the application under test (AUT). The client library also receives the result of that command and passes it back to your program. Your program can receive the result and store it into a program variable and report it as a success or failure, or possibly take corrective action if it was an unexpected error.

So to create a test program, you simply write a program that runs a set of Selenium commands using a client library API. And, optionally, if you already have a Selenese test script created in the Selenium-IDE, you can generate the Selenium RC code. The Selenium-IDE can translate (using its Export menu item) its Selenium commands into a client-driver’s API function calls. See the Selenium-IDE chapter for specifics on exporting RC code from Selenium-IDE.

Installation¶

Installation is rather a misnomer for Selenium. Selenium has a set of libraries available in the programming language of your choice. You could download them from downloads page

Once you’ve chosen a language to work with, you simply need to:

Install the Selenium RC Server.
Set up a programming project using a language specific client driver.

Installing Selenium Server¶

The Selenium RC server is simply a Java jar file (selenium-server-standalone-<version-number>.jar), which doesn’t require any special installation. Just downloading the zip file and extracting the server in the desired directory is sufficient.

Running Selenium Server¶

Before starting any tests you must start the server. Go to the directory where Selenium RC’s server is located and run the following from a command-line console.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-<version-number>.jar

This can be simplified by creating a batch or shell executable file (.bat on Windows and .sh on Linux) containing the command above. Then make a shortcut to that executable on your desktop and simply double-click the icon to start the server.

For the server to run you’ll need Java installed and the PATH environment variable correctly configured to run it from the console. You can check that you have Java correctly installed by running the following on a console.

java -version

If you get a version number (which needs to be 1.5 or later), you’re ready to start using Selenium RC.

Using the Java Client Driver¶

Download Selenium java client driver zip from the SeleniumHQ downloads page.
Extract selenium-java-<version-number>.jar file
Open your desired Java IDE (Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, Netweaver, etc.)
Create a java project.
Add the selenium-java-<version-number>.jar files to your project as references.
Add to your project classpath the file selenium-java-<version-number>.jar.
From Selenium-IDE, export a script to a Java file and include it in your Java project, or write your Selenium test in Java using the selenium-java-client API. The API is presented later in this chapter. You can either use JUnit, or TestNg to run your test, or you can write your own simple main() program. These concepts are explained later in this section.
Run Selenium server from the console.
Execute your test from the Java IDE or from the command-line.

For details on Java test project configuration, see the Appendix sections Configuring Selenium RC With Eclipse and Configuring Selenium RC With Intellij.

Using the Python Client Driver¶

Install Selenium via PIP, instructions linked at SeleniumHQ downloads page
Either write your Selenium test in Python or export a script from Selenium-IDE to a python file.
Run Selenium server from the console
Execute your test from a console or your Python IDE

For details on Python client driver configuration, see the appendix Python Client Driver Configuration.

Using the .NET Client Driver¶

Download Selenium RC from the SeleniumHQ downloads page
Extract the folder
Download and install NUnit ( Note: You can use NUnit as your test engine. If you’re not familiar yet with NUnit, you can also write a simple main() function to run your tests; however NUnit is very useful as a test engine.)
Open your desired .Net IDE (Visual Studio, SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop)
Create a class library (.dll)
Add references to the following DLLs: nmock.dll, nunit.core.dll, nunit. framework.dll, ThoughtWorks.Selenium.Core.dll, ThoughtWorks.Selenium.IntegrationTests.dll and ThoughtWorks.Selenium.UnitTests.dll
Write your Selenium test in a .Net language (C#, VB.Net), or export a script from Selenium-IDE to a C# file and copy this code into the class file you just created.
Write your own simple main() program or you can include NUnit in your project for running your test. These concepts are explained later in this chapter.
Run Selenium server from console
Run your test either from the IDE, from the NUnit GUI or from the command line

For specific details on .NET client driver configuration with Visual Studio, see the appendix .NET client driver configuration.

Using the Ruby Client Driver¶

If you do not already have RubyGems, install it from RubyForge
Run gem install selenium-client
At the top of your test script, add require "selenium/client"
Write your test script using any Ruby test harness (eg Test::Unit, Mini::Test or RSpec).
Run Selenium RC server from the console.
Execute your test in the same way you would run any other Ruby script.

For details on Ruby client driver configuration, see the Selenium-Client documentation

From Selenese to a Program¶

The primary task for using Selenium RC is to convert your Selenese into a programming language. In this section, we provide several different language-specific examples.

Sample Test Script¶

Let’s start with an example Selenese test script. Imagine recording the following test with Selenium-IDE.

open	/
type	q	selenium rc
clickAndWait	btnG
assertTextPresent	Results * for selenium rc

Note: This example would work with the Google search page http://www.google.com

Selenese as Programming Code¶

Here is the test script exported (via Selenium-IDE) to each of the supported programming languages. If you have at least basic knowledge of an object- oriented programming language, you will understand how Selenium runs Selenese commands by reading one of these examples. To see an example in a specific language, select one of these buttons.

/** Add JUnit framework to your classpath if not already there

* for this example to work

package com.example.tests;

import com.thoughtworks.selenium.*;

import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class NewTest extends SeleneseTestCase {

public void setUp() throws Exception {

setUp("http://www.google.com/", "*firefox");

}

public void testNew() throws Exception {

selenium.open("/");

selenium.type("q", "selenium rc");

selenium.click("btnG");

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

assertTrue(selenium.isTextPresent("Results * for selenium rc"));

}

In the next section we’ll explain how to build a test program using the generated code.

Programming Your Test¶

Now we’ll illustrate how to program your own tests using examples in each of the supported programming languages. There are essentially two tasks:

Generate your script into a programming language from Selenium-IDE, optionally modifying the result.
Write a very simple main program that executes the generated code.

Optionally, you can adopt a test engine platform like JUnit or TestNG for Java, or NUnit for .NET if you are using one of those languages.

Here, we show language-specific examples. The language-specific APIs tend to differ from one to another, so you’ll find a separate explanation for each.

Java¶

For Java, people use either JUnit or TestNG as the test engine. Some development environments like Eclipse have direct support for these via plug-ins. This makes it even easier. Teaching JUnit or TestNG is beyond the scope of this document however materials may be found online and there are publications available. If you are already a “java-shop” chances are your developers will already have some experience with one of these test frameworks.

You will probably want to rename the test class from “NewTest” to something of your own choosing. Also, you will need to change the browser-open parameters in the statement:

selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*iehta", "http://www.google.com/");

The Selenium-IDE generated code will look like this. This example has comments added manually for additional clarity.

package com.example.tests;

// We specify the package of our tests

import com.thoughtworks.selenium.*;

// This is the driver's import. You'll use this for instantiating a

// browser and making it do what you need.

import java.util.regex.Pattern;

// Selenium-IDE add the Pattern module because it's sometimes used for

// regex validations. You can remove the module if it's not used in your

// script.

public class NewTest extends SeleneseTestCase {

// We create our Selenium test case

public void setUp() throws Exception {

setUp("http://www.google.com/", "*firefox");

// We instantiate and start the browser

}

public void testNew() throws Exception {

selenium.open("/");

selenium.type("q", "selenium rc");

selenium.click("btnG");

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

assertTrue(selenium.isTextPresent("Results * for selenium rc"));

// These are the real test steps

}

C#¶

The .NET Client Driver works with Microsoft.NET. It can be used with any .NET testing framework like NUnit or the Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

Selenium-IDE assumes you will use NUnit as your testing framework. You can see this in the generated code below. It includes the using statement for NUnit along with corresponding NUnit attributes identifying the role for each member function of the test class.

You will probably have to rename the test class from “NewTest” to something of your own choosing. Also, you will need to change the browser-open parameters in the statement:

selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*iehta", "http://www.google.com/");

The generated code will look similar to this.

You can allow NUnit to manage the execution of your tests. Or alternatively, you can write a simple main() program that instantiates the test object and runs each of the three methods, SetupTest(), TheNewTest(), and TeardownTest() in turn.

Python¶

Pyunit is the test framework to use for Python. To learn Pyunit refer to its official documentation <http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html>_.

The basic test structure is:

Ruby¶

Old (pre 2.0) versions of Selenium-IDE generate Ruby code that requires the old Selenium gem. Therefore, it is advisable to update any Ruby scripts generated by the IDE as follows:

1. On line 1, change require "selenium" to require "selenium/client"

2. On line 11, change Selenium::SeleniumDriver.new to Selenium::Client::Driver.new

You probably also want to change the class name to something more informative than “Untitled,” and change the test method’s name to something other than “test_untitled.”

Here is a simple example created by modifying the Ruby code generated by Selenium IDE, as described above.

Perl, PHP¶

The members of the documentation team have not used Selenium RC with Perl or PHP. If you are using Selenium RC with either of these two languages please contact the Documentation Team (see the chapter on contributing). We would love to include some examples from you and your experiences, to support Perl and PHP users.

Learning the API¶

The Selenium RC API uses naming conventions that, assuming you understand Selenese, much of the interface will be self-explanatory. Here, however, we explain the most critical and possibly less obvious aspects.

Starting the Browser¶

setUp("http://www.google.com/", "*firefox");

Each of these examples opens the browser and represents that browser by assigning a “browser instance” to a program variable. This program variable is then used to call methods from the browser. These methods execute the Selenium commands, i.e. like open or type or the verify commands.

The parameters required when creating the browser instance are:

host

Specifies the IP address of the computer where the server is located. Usually, this is the same machine as where the client is running, so in this case localhost is passed. In some clients this is an optional parameter.

port

Specifies the TCP/IP socket where the server is listening waiting for the client to establish a connection. This also is optional in some client drivers.

browser

The browser in which you want to run the tests. This is a required parameter.

url

The base url of the application under test. This is required by all the client libs and is integral information for starting up the browser-proxy-AUT communication.

Note that some of the client libraries require the browser to be started explicitly by calling its start() method.

Running Commands¶

Once you have the browser initialized and assigned to a variable (generally named “selenium”) you can make it run Selenese commands by calling the respective methods from the browser variable. For example, to call the type method of the selenium object:

selenium.type(“field-id”,”string to type”)

In the background the browser will actually perform a type operation, essentially identical to a user typing input into the browser, by using the locator and the string you specified during the method call.

Reporting Results¶

Selenium RC does not have its own mechanism for reporting results. Rather, it allows you to build your reporting customized to your needs using features of your chosen programming language. That’s great, but what if you simply want something quick that’s already done for you? Often an existing library or test framework can meet your needs faster than developing your own test reporting code.

Test Framework Reporting Tools¶

Test frameworks are available for many programming languages. These, along with their primary function of providing a flexible test engine for executing your tests, include library code for reporting results. For example, Java has two commonly used test frameworks, JUnit and TestNG. .NET also has its own, NUnit.

We won’t teach the frameworks themselves here; that’s beyond the scope of this user guide. We will simply introduce the framework features that relate to Selenium along with some techniques you can apply. There are good books available on these test frameworks however along with information on the internet.

Test Report Libraries¶

Also available are third-party libraries specifically created for reporting test results in your chosen programming language. These often support a variety of formats such as HTML or PDF.

What’s The Best Approach?¶

Most people new to the testing frameworks will begin with the framework’s built-in reporting features. From there most will examine any available libraries as that’s less time consuming than developing your own. As you begin to use Selenium no doubt you will start putting in your own “print statements” for reporting progress. That may gradually lead to you developing your own reporting, possibly in parallel to using a library or test framework. Regardless, after the initial, but short, learning curve you will naturally develop what works best for your own situation.

Test Reporting Examples¶

To illustrate, we’ll direct you to some specific tools in some of the other languages supported by Selenium. The ones listed here are commonly used and have been used extensively (and therefore recommended) by the authors of this guide.

Test Reports in Java¶

If Selenium Test cases are developed using JUnit then JUnit Report can be used to generate test reports. Refer to JUnit Report for specifics.
If Selenium Test cases are developed using TestNG then no external task is required to generate test reports. The TestNG framework generates an HTML report which list details of tests. See TestNG Report for more.
ReportNG is a HTML reporting plug-in for the TestNG framework. It is intended as a replacement for the default TestNG HTML report. ReportNG provides a simple, colour-coded view of the test results. See ReportNG for more.
Also, for a very nice summary report try using TestNG-xslt. A TestNG-xslt Report looks like this.

See TestNG-xslt for more.

Logging the Selenese Commands

Logging Selenium can be used to generate a report of all the Selenese commands in your test along with the success or failure of each. Logging Selenium extends the Java client driver to add this Selenese logging ability. Please refer to Logging Selenium.
When using Python Client Driver then HTMLTestRunner can be used to generate a Test Report. See HTMLTestRunner.
If RSpec framework is used for writing Selenium Test Cases in Ruby then its HTML report can be used to generate a test report. Refer to RSpec Report for more.

Test Reports for Python¶

Test Reports for Ruby¶

Note

If you are interested in a language independent log of what’s going on, take a look at Selenium Server Logging

Adding Some Spice to Your Tests¶

Now we’ll get to the whole reason for using Selenium RC, adding programming logic to your tests. It’s the same as for any program. Program flow is controlled using condition statements and iteration. In addition you can report progress information using I/O. In this section we’ll show some examples of how programming language constructs can be combined with Selenium to solve common testing problems.

You will find as you transition from the simple tests of the existence of page elements to tests of dynamic functionality involving multiple web-pages and varying data that you will require programming logic for verifying expected results. Basically, the Selenium-IDE does not support iteration and standard condition statements. You can do some conditions by embedding javascript in Selenese parameters, however iteration is impossible, and most conditions will be much easier in a programming language. In addition, you may need exception handling for error recovery. For these reasons and others, we have written this section to illustrate the use of common programming techniques to give you greater ‘verification power’ in your automated testing.

The examples in this section are written in C# and Java, although the code is simple and can be easily adapted to the other supported languages. If you have some basic knowledge of an object-oriented programming language you shouldn’t have difficulty understanding this section.

Iteration¶

Iteration is one of the most common things people need to do in their tests. For example, you may want to to execute a search multiple times. Or, perhaps for verifying your test results you need to process a “result set” returned from a database.

Using the same Google search example we used earlier, let’s check the Selenium search results. This test could use the Selenese:

open	/
type	q	selenium rc
clickAndWait	btnG
assertTextPresent	Results * for selenium rc
type	q	selenium ide
clickAndWait	btnG
assertTextPresent	Results * for selenium ide
type	q	selenium grid
clickAndWait	btnG
assertTextPresent	Results * for selenium grid

The code has been repeated to run the same steps 3 times. But multiple copies of the same code is not good program practice because it’s more work to maintain. By using a programming language, we can iterate over the search results for a more flexible and maintainable solution.

In C#:

// Collection of String values.

String[] arr = {"ide", "rc", "grid"};

// Execute loop for each String in array 'arr'.

foreach (String s in arr) {

sel.open("/");

sel.type("q", "selenium " +s);

sel.click("btnG");

sel.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

assertTrue("Expected text: " +s+ " is missing on page."

, sel.isTextPresent("Results * for selenium " + s));

}

Condition Statements¶

To illustrate using conditions in tests we’ll start with an example. A common problem encountered while running Selenium tests occurs when an expected element is not available on page. For example, when running the following line:

selenium.type("q", "selenium " +s);

If element ‘q’ is not on the page then an exception is thrown:

com.thoughtworks.selenium.SeleniumException: ERROR: Element q not found

This can cause your test to abort. For some tests that’s what you want. But often that is not desirable as your test script has many other subsequent tests to perform.

A better approach is to first validate whether the element is really present and then take alternatives when it it is not. Let’s look at this using Java.

// If element is available on page then perform type operation.

if(selenium.isElementPresent("q")) {

selenium.type("q", "Selenium rc");

} else {

System.out.printf("Element: " +q+ " is not available on page.")

}

The advantage of this approach is to continue with test execution even if some UI elements are not available on page.

Executing JavaScript from Your Test¶

JavaScript comes very handy in exercising an application which is not directly supported by selenium. The getEval method of selenium API can be used to execute JavaScript from selenium RC.

Consider an application having check boxes with no static identifiers. In this case one could evaluate JavaScript from selenium RC to get ids of all check boxes and then exercise them.

public static String[] getAllCheckboxIds () {

String script = "var inputId = new Array();";// Create array in java script.

script += "var cnt = 0;"; // Counter for check box ids.

script += "var inputFields = new Array();"; // Create array in java script.

script += "inputFields = window.document.getElementsByTagName('input');"; // Collect input elements.

script += "for(var i=0; i<inputFields.length; i++) {"; // Loop through the collected elements.

script += "if(inputFields[i].id !=null " +

"&& inputFields[i].id !='undefined' " +

"&& inputFields[i].getAttribute('type') == 'checkbox') {"; // If input field is of type check box and input id is not null.

script += "inputId[cnt]=inputFields[i].id ;" + // Save check box id to inputId array.

"cnt++;" + // increment the counter.

"}" + // end of if.

"}"; // end of for.

script += "inputId.toString();" ;// Convert array in to string.

String[] checkboxIds = selenium.getEval(script).split(","); // Split the string.

return checkboxIds;

}

To count number of images on a page:

selenium.getEval("window.document.images.length;");

Remember to use window object in case of DOM expressions as by default selenium window is referred to, not the test window.

Server Options¶

When the server is launched, command line options can be used to change the default server behaviour.

Recall, the server is started by running the following.

$ java -jar selenium-server-standalone-<version-number>.jar

To see the list of options, run the server with the -h option.

$ java -jar selenium-server-standalone-<version-number>.jar -h

You’ll see a list of all the options you can use with the server and a brief description of each. The provided descriptions will not always be enough, so we’ve provided explanations for some of the more important options.

Proxy Configuration¶

If your AUT is behind an HTTP proxy which requires authentication then you should configure http.proxyHost, http.proxyPort, http.proxyUser and http.proxyPassword using the following command.

$ java -jar selenium-server-standalone-<version-number>.jar -Dhttp.proxyHost=proxy.com -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttp.proxyUser=username -Dhttp.proxyPassword=password

Multi-Window Mode¶

If you are using Selenium 1.0 you can probably skip this section, since multiwindow mode is the default behavior. However, prior to version 1.0, Selenium by default ran the application under test in a sub frame as shown here.

Some applications didn’t run correctly in a sub frame, and needed to be loaded into the top frame of the window. The multi-window mode option allowed the AUT to run in a separate window rather than in the default frame where it could then have the top frame it required.

For older versions of Selenium you must specify multiwindow mode explicitly with the following option:

-multiwindow

As of Selenium RC 1.0, if you want to run your test within a single frame (i.e. using the standard for earlier Selenium versions) you can state this to the Selenium Server using the option

-singlewindow

Specifying the Firefox Profile¶

Firefox will not run two instances simultaneously unless you specify a separate profile for each instance. Selenium RC 1.0 and later runs in a separate profile automatically, so if you are using Selenium 1.0, you can probably skip this section. However, if you’re using an older version of Selenium or if you need to use a specific profile for your tests (such as adding an https certificate or having some addons installed), you will need to explicitly specify the profile.

First, to create a separate Firefox profile, follow this procedure. Open the Windows Start menu, select “Run”, then type and enter one of the following:

firefox.exe -profilemanager

firefox.exe -P

Create the new profile using the dialog. Then when you run Selenium Server, tell it to use this new Firefox profile with the server command-line option -firefoxProfileTemplate and specify the path to the profile using its filename and directory path.

-firefoxProfileTemplate "path to the profile"

Warning

Be sure to put your profile in a new folder separate from the default!!! The Firefox profile manager tool will delete all files in a folder if you delete a profile, regardless of whether they are profile files or not.

More information about Firefox profiles can be found in Mozilla’s Knowledge Base

Run Selenese Directly Within the Server Using -htmlSuite¶

You can run Selenese html files directly within the Selenium Server by passing the html file to the server’s command line. For instance:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-<version-number>.jar -htmlSuite "*firefox"

"http://www.google.com" "c:\absolute\path\to\my\HTMLSuite.html"

"c:\absolute\path\to\my\results.html"

This will automatically launch your HTML suite, run all the tests and save a nice HTML report with the results.

Note

When using this option, the server will start the tests and wait for a specified number of seconds for the test to complete; if the test doesn’t complete within that amount of time, the command will exit with a non-zero exit code and no results file will be generated.

This command line is very long so be careful when you type it. Note this requires you to pass in an HTML Selenese suite, not a single test. Also be aware the -htmlSuite option is incompatible with -interactive You cannot run both at the same time.

Selenium Server Logging¶

Server-Side Logs¶

When launching selenium server the -log option can be used to record valuable debugging information reported by the Selenium Server to a text file.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-<version-number>.jar -log selenium.log

This log file is more verbose than the standard console logs (it includes DEBUG level logging messages). The log file also includes the logger name, and the ID number of the thread that logged the message. For example:

20:44:25 DEBUG [12] org.openqa.selenium.server.SeleniumDriverResourceHandler -

Browser 465828/:top frame1 posted START NEW

The message format is

TIMESTAMP(HH:mm:ss) LEVEL [THREAD] LOGGER - MESSAGE

This message may be multiline.

Browser-Side Logs¶

JavaScript on the browser side (Selenium Core) also logs important messages; in many cases, these can be more useful to the end-user than the regular Selenium Server logs. To access browser-side logs, pass the -browserSideLog argument to the Selenium Server.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-<version-number>.jar -browserSideLog

-browserSideLog must be combined with the -log argument, to log browserSideLogs (as well as all other DEBUG level logging messages) to a file.

Specifying the Path to a Specific Browser¶

You can specify to Selenium RC a path to a specific browser. This is useful if you have different versions of the same browser and you wish to use a specific one. Also, this is used to allow your tests to run against a browser not directly supported by Selenium RC. When specifying the run mode, use the *custom specifier followed by the full path to the browser’s executable:

*custom <path to browser>

Selenium RC Architecture¶

Note

This topic tries to explain the technical implementation behind Selenium RC. It’s not fundamental for a Selenium user to know this, but could be useful for understanding some of the problems you might find in the future.

To understand in detail how Selenium RC Server works and why it uses proxy injection and heightened privilege modes you must first understand the same origin policy.

The Same Origin Policy¶

The main restriction that Selenium faces is the Same Origin Policy. This security restriction is applied by every browser in the market and its objective is to ensure that a site’s content will never be accessible by a script from another site. The Same Origin Policy dictates that any code loaded within the browser can only operate within that website’s domain. It cannot perform functions on another website. So for example, if the browser loads JavaScript code when it loads www.mysite.com, it cannot run that loaded code against www.mysite2.com–even if that’s another of your sites. If this were possible, a script placed on any website you open would be able to read information on your bank account if you had the account page opened on other tab. This is called XSS (Cross-site Scripting).

To work within this policy, Selenium-Core (and its JavaScript commands that make all the magic happen) must be placed in the same origin as the Application Under Test (same URL).

Historically, Selenium-Core was limited by this problem since it was implemented in JavaScript. Selenium RC is not, however, restricted by the Same Origin Policy. Its use of the Selenium Server as a proxy avoids this problem. It, essentially, tells the browser that the browser is working on a single “spoofed” website that the Server provides.

Note

You can find additional information about this topic on Wikipedia pages about Same Origin Policy and XSS.

Proxy Injection¶

The first method Selenium used to avoid the The Same Origin Policy was Proxy Injection. In Proxy Injection Mode, the Selenium Server acts as a client-configured [1] HTTP proxy [2], that sits between the browser and the Application Under Test. It then masks the AUT under a fictional URL (embedding Selenium-Core and the set of tests and delivering them as if they were coming from the same origin).

[1]	The proxy is a third person in the middle that passes the ball between the two parts. It acts as a “web server” that delivers the AUT to the browser. Being a proxy gives Selenium Server the capability of “lying” about the AUT’s real URL.

[2]	The browser is launched with a configuration profile that has set localhost:4444 as the HTTP proxy, this is why any HTTP request that the browser does will pass through Selenium server and the response will pass through it and not from the real server.

Here is an architectural diagram.

As a test suite starts in your favorite language, the following happens:

The client/driver establishes a connection with the selenium-RC server.
Selenium RC server launches a browser (or reuses an old one) with a URL that injects Selenium-Core’s JavaScript into the browser-loaded web page.
The client-driver passes a Selenese command to the server.
The Server interprets the command and then triggers the corresponding JavaScript execution to execute that command within the browser. Selenium-Core instructs the browser to act on that first instruction, typically opening a page of the AUT.
The browser receives the open request and asks for the website’s content from the Selenium RC server (set as the HTTP proxy for the browser to use).
Selenium RC server communicates with the Web server asking for the page and once it receives it, it sends the page to the browser masking the origin to look like the page comes from the same server as Selenium-Core (this allows Selenium-Core to comply with the Same Origin Policy).
The browser receives the web page and renders it in the frame/window reserved for it.

Heightened Privileges Browsers¶

This workflow in this method is very similar to Proxy Injection but the main difference is that the browsers are launched in a special mode called Heightened Privileges, which allows websites to do things that are not commonly permitted (as doing XSS, or filling file upload inputs and pretty useful stuff for Selenium). By using these browser modes, Selenium Core is able to directly open the AUT and read/interact with its content without having to pass the whole AUT through the Selenium RC server.

Here is the architectural diagram.

As a test suite starts in your favorite language, the following happens:

The client/driver establishes a connection with the selenium-RC server.
Selenium RC server launches a browser (or reuses an old one) with a URL that will load Selenium-Core in the web page.
Selenium-Core gets the first instruction from the client/driver (via another HTTP request made to the Selenium RC Server).
Selenium-Core acts on that first instruction, typically opening a page of the AUT.
The browser receives the open request and asks the Web Server for the page. Once the browser receives the web page, renders it in the frame/window reserved for it.

Handling HTTPS and Security Popups¶

Many applications switch from using HTTP to HTTPS when they need to send encrypted information such as passwords or credit card information. This is common with many of today’s web applications. Selenium RC supports this.

To ensure the HTTPS site is genuine, the browser will need a security certificate. Otherwise, when the browser accesses the AUT using HTTPS, it will assume that application is not ‘trusted’. When this occurs the browser displays security popups, and these popups cannot be closed using Selenium RC.

When dealing with HTTPS in a Selenium RC test, you must use a run mode that supports this and handles the security certificate for you. You specify the run mode when your test program initializes Selenium.

In Selenium RC 1.0 beta 2 and later use *firefox or *iexplore for the run mode. In earlier versions, including Selenium RC 1.0 beta 1, use *chrome or *iehta, for the run mode. Using these run modes, you will not need to install any special security certificates; Selenium RC will handle it for you.

In version 1.0 the run modes *firefox or *iexplore are recommended. However, there are additional run modes of *iexploreproxy and *firefoxproxy. These are provided for backwards compatibility only, and should not be used unless required by legacy test programs. Their use will present limitations with security certificate handling and with the running of multiple windows if your application opens additional browser windows.

In earlier versions of Selenium RC, *chrome or *iehta were the run modes that supported HTTPS and the handling of security popups. These were considered ‘experimental modes although they became quite stable and many people used them. If you are using Selenium 1.0 you do not need, and should not use, these older run modes.

Security Certificates Explained¶

Normally, your browser will trust the application you are testing by installing a security certificate which you already own. You can check this in your browser’s options or Internet properties (if you don’t know your AUT’s security certificate ask your system administrator). When Selenium loads your browser it injects code to intercept messages between the browser and the server. The browser now thinks untrusted software is trying to look like your application. It responds by alerting you with popup messages.

To get around this, Selenium RC, (again when using a run mode that support this) will install its own security certificate, temporarily, to your client machine in a place where the browser can access it. This tricks the browser into thinking it’s accessing a site different from your AUT and effectively suppresses the popups.

Another method used with earlier versions of Selenium was to install the Cybervillians security certificate provided with your Selenium installation. Most users should no longer need to do this however; if you are running Selenium RC in proxy injection mode, you may need to explicitly install this security certificate.

Supporting Additional Browsers and Browser Configurations¶

The Selenium API supports running against multiple browsers in addition to Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. See the SeleniumHQ.org website for supported browsers. In addition, when a browser is not directly supported, you may still run your Selenium tests against a browser of your choosing by using the “*custom” run-mode (i.e. in place of *firefox or *iexplore) when your test application starts the browser. With this, you pass in the path to the browsers executable within the API call. This can also be done from the Server in interactive mode.

cmd=getNewBrowserSession&1=*custom c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\MyBrowser.exe&2=http://www.google.com

Running Tests with Different Browser Configurations¶

Normally Selenium RC automatically configures the browser, but if you launch the browser using the “*custom” run mode, you can force Selenium RC to launch the browser as-is, without using an automatic configuration.

For example, you can launch Firefox with a custom configuration like this:

cmd=getNewBrowserSession&1=*custom c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe&2=http://www.google.com

Note that when launching the browser this way, you must manually configure the browser to use the Selenium Server as a proxy. Normally this just means opening your browser preferences and specifying “localhost:4444” as an HTTP proxy, but instructions for this can differ radically from browser to browser. Consult your browser’s documentation for details.

Be aware that Mozilla browsers can vary in how they start and stop. One may need to set the MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable to make Mozilla browsers behave a little more predictably. Unix users should avoid launching the browser using a shell script; it’s generally better to use the binary executable (e.g. firefox-bin) directly.

Troubleshooting Common Problems¶

When getting started with Selenium RC there’s a few potential problems that are commonly encountered. We present them along with their solutions here.

Unable to Connect to Server¶

When your test program cannot connect to the Selenium Server, Selenium throws an exception in your test program. It should display this message or a similar one:

"Unable to connect to remote server (Inner Exception Message:

No connection could be made because the target machine actively

refused it )"

(using .NET and XP Service Pack 2)

If you see a message like this, be sure you started the Selenium Server. If so, then there is a problem with the connectivity between the Selenium Client Library and the Selenium Server.

When starting with Selenium RC, most people begin by running their test program (with a Selenium Client Library) and the Selenium Server on the same machine. To do this use “localhost” as your connection parameter. We recommend beginning this way since it reduces the influence of potential networking problems which you’re getting started. Assuming your operating system has typical networking and TCP/IP settings you should have little difficulty. In truth, many people choose to run the tests this way.

If, however, you do want to run Selenium Server on a remote machine, the connectivity should be fine assuming you have valid TCP/IP connectivity between the two machines.

If you have difficulty connecting, you can use common networking tools like ping, telnet, ifconfig(Unix)/ipconfig (Windows), etc to ensure you have a valid network connection. If unfamilar with these, your system administrator can assist you.

Unable to Load the Browser¶

Ok, not a friendly error message, sorry, but if the Selenium Server cannot load the browser you will likely see this error.

(500) Internal Server Error

This could be caused by

Firefox (prior to Selenium 1.0) cannot start because the browser is already open and you did not specify a separate profile. See the section on Firefox profiles under Server Options.
The run mode you’re using doesn’t match any browser on your machine. Check the parameters you passed to Selenium when you program opens the browser.
You specified the path to the browser explicitly (using “*custom”–see above) but the path is incorrect. Check to be sure the path is correct. Also check the user group to be sure there are no known issues with your browser and the “*custom” parameters.

Selenium Cannot Find the AUT¶

If your test program starts the browser successfully, but the browser doesn’t display the website you’re testing, the most likely cause is your test program is not using the correct URL.

This can easily happen. When you use Selenium-IDE to export your script, it inserts a dummy URL. You must manually change the URL to the correct one for your application to be tested.

Firefox Refused Shutdown While Preparing a Profile¶

This most often occurs when you run your Selenium RC test program against Firefox, but you already have a Firefox browser session running and, you didn’t specify a separate profile when you started the Selenium Server. The error from the test program looks like this:

Error: java.lang.RuntimeException: Firefox refused shutdown while

preparing a profile

Here’s the complete error message from the server:

16:20:03.919 INFO - Preparing Firefox profile...

16:20:27.822 WARN - GET /selenium-server/driver/?cmd=getNewBrowserSession&1=*fir

efox&2=http%3a%2f%2fsage-webapp1.qa.idc.com HTTP/1.1

java.lang.RuntimeException: Firefox refused shutdown while preparing a profile

at org.openqa.selenium.server.browserlaunchers.FirefoxCustomProfileLaunc

her.waitForFullProfileToBeCreated(FirefoxCustomProfileLauncher.java:277)

...

Caused by: org.openqa.selenium.server.browserlaunchers.FirefoxCustomProfileLaunc

her$FileLockRemainedException: Lock file still present! C:\DOCUME~1\jsvec\LOCALS

~1\Temp\customProfileDir203138\parent.lock

To resolve this, see the section on Specifying a Separate Firefox Profile

Versioning Problems¶

Make sure your version of Selenium supports the version of your browser. For example, Selenium RC 0.92 does not support Firefox 3. At times you may be lucky (I was). But don’t forget to check which browser versions are supported by the version of Selenium you are using. When in doubt, use the latest release version of Selenium with the most widely used version of your browser.

Error message: “(Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)” while starting server¶

This error says you’re not using a correct version of Java. The Selenium Server requires Java 1.5 or higher.

To check double-check your java version, run this from the command line.

java -version

You should see a message showing the Java version.

java version "1.5.0_07"

Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_07-b03)

Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_07-b03, mixed mode)

If you see a lower version number, you may need to update the JRE, or you may simply need to add it to your PATH environment variable.

404 error when running the getNewBrowserSession command¶

If you’re getting a 404 error while attempting to open a page on “http://www.google.com/selenium-server/”, then it must be because the Selenium Server was not correctly configured as a proxy. The “selenium-server” directory doesn’t exist on google.com; it only appears to exist when the proxy is properly configured. Proxy Configuration highly depends on how the browser is launched with *firefox, *iexplore, *opera, or *custom.

*iexplore: If the browser is launched using *iexplore, you could be having a problem with Internet Explorer’s proxy settings. Selenium Server attempts To configure the global proxy settings in the Internet Options Control Panel. You must make sure that those are correctly configured when Selenium Server launches the browser. Try looking at your Internet Options control panel. Click on the “Connections” tab and click on “LAN Settings”.
If you need to use a proxy to access the application you want to test, you’ll need to start Selenium Server with “-Dhttp.proxyHost”; see the Proxy Configuration for more details.
You may also try configuring your proxy manually and then launching the browser with *custom, or with *iehta browser launcher.
*custom: When using *custom you must configure the proxy correctly(manually),

otherwise you’ll get a 404 error. Double-check that you’ve configured your proxy settings correctly. To check whether you’ve configured the proxy correctly is to attempt to intentionally configure the browser incorrectly. Try configuring the browser to use the wrong proxy server hostname, or the wrong port. If you had successfully configured the browser’s proxy settings incorrectly, then the browser will be unable to connect to the Internet, which is one way to make sure that one is adjusting the relevant settings.

For other browsers (*firefox, *opera) we automatically hard-code the proxy for you, and so there are no known issues with this functionality. If you’re encountering 404 errors and have followed this user guide carefully post your results to user group for some help from the user community.

Permission Denied Error¶

The most common reason for this error is that your session is attempting to violate the same-origin policy by crossing domain boundaries (e.g., accesses a page from http://domain1 and then accesses a page from http://domain2) or switching protocols (moving from http://domainX to https://domainX).

This error can also occur when JavaScript attempts to find UI objects which are not yet available (before the page has completely loaded), or are no longer available (after the page has started to be unloaded). This is most typically encountered with AJAX pages which are working with sections of a page or subframes that load and/or reload independently of the larger page.

This error can be intermittent. Often it is impossible to reproduce the problem with a debugger because the trouble stems from race conditions which are not reproducible when the debugger’s overhead is added to the system. Permission issues are covered in some detail in the tutorial. Read the section about the The Same Origin Policy, Proxy Injection carefully.

Handling Browser Popup Windows¶

There are several kinds of “Popups” that you can get during a Selenium test. You may not be able to close these popups by running selenium commands if they are initiated by the browser and not your AUT. You may need to know how to manage these. Each type of popup needs to be addressed differently.

HTTP basic authentication dialogs: These dialogs prompt for a username/password to login to the site. To login to a site that requires HTTP basic authentication, use a username and password in the URL, as described in RFC 1738, like this: open(“http://myusername:myuserpassword@myexample.com/blah/blah/blah”).
SSL certificate warnings: Selenium RC automatically attempts to spoof SSL certificates when it is enabled as a proxy; see more on this in the section on HTTPS. If your browser is configured correctly, you should never see SSL certificate warnings, but you may need to configure your browser to trust our dangerous “CyberVillains” SSL certificate authority. Again, refer to the HTTPS section for how to do this.
modal JavaScript alert/confirmation/prompt dialogs: Selenium tries to conceal those dialogs from you (by replacing window.alert, window.confirm and window.prompt) so they won’t stop the execution of your page. If you’re seeing an alert pop-up, it’s probably because it fired during the page load process, which is usually too early for us to protect the page. Selenese contains commands for asserting or verifying alert and confirmation popups. See the sections on these topics in Chapter 4.

On Linux, why isn’t my Firefox browser session closing?¶

On Unix/Linux you must invoke “firefox-bin” directly, so make sure that executable is on the path. If executing Firefox through a shell script, when it comes time to kill the browser Selenium RC will kill the shell script, leaving the browser running. You can specify the path to firefox-bin directly, like this.

cmd=getNewBrowserSession&1=*firefox /usr/local/firefox/firefox-bin&2=http://www.google.com

Firefox *chrome doesn’t work with custom profile¶

Check Firefox profile folder -> prefs.js -> user_pref(“browser.startup.page”, 0); Comment this line like this: “//user_pref(“browser.startup.page”, 0);” and try again.

Is it ok to load a custom pop-up as the parent page is loading (i.e., before the parent page’s javascript window.onload() function runs)?¶

No. Selenium relies on interceptors to determine window names as they are being loaded. These interceptors work best in catching new windows if the windows are loaded AFTER the onload() function. Selenium may not recognize windows loaded before the onload function.

Problems With Verify Commands¶

If you export your tests from Selenium-IDE, you may find yourself getting empty verify strings from your tests (depending on the programming language used).

Note: This section is not yet developed.

Safari and MultiWindow Mode¶

Note: This section is not yet developed.

Firefox on Linux¶

On Unix/Linux, versions of Selenium before 1.0 needed to invoke “firefox-bin” directly, so if you are using a previous version, make sure that the real executable is on the path.

On most Linux distributions, the real firefox-bin is located on:

/usr/lib/firefox-x.x.x/

Where the x.x.x is the version number you currently have. So, to add that path to the user’s path. you will have to add the following to your .bashrc file:

export PATH="$PATH:/usr/lib/firefox-x.x.x/"

If necessary, you can specify the path to firefox-bin directly in your test, like this:

"*firefox /usr/lib/firefox-x.x.x/firefox-bin"

IE and Style Attributes¶

If you are running your tests on Internet Explorer and you cannot locate elements using their style attribute. For example:

//td[@style="background-color:yellow"]

This would work perfectly in Firefox, Opera or Safari but not with IE. IE interprets the keys in @style as uppercase. So, even if the source code is in lowercase, you should use:

//td[@style="BACKGROUND-COLOR:yellow"]

This is a problem if your test is intended to work on multiple browsers, but you can easily code your test to detect the situation and try the alternative locator that only works in IE.

Error encountered - “Cannot convert object to primitive value” with shut down of *googlechrome browser¶

To avoid this error you have to start browser with an option that disables same origin policy checks:

selenium.start("commandLineFlags=--disable-web-security");

Error encountered in IE - “Couldn’t open app window; is the pop-up blocker enabled?”¶

To avoid this error you have to configure the browser: disable the popup blocker AND uncheck ‘Enable Protected Mode’ option in Tools >> Options >> Security.

Where can I Ask Questions that Aren’t Answered Here?¶

Try our user group

06_test_design_considerations.jsp

Test Design Considerations¶

Introducing Test Design¶

We’ve provided in this chapter information that will be useful to both those new to test automation and for the experienced QA professional. Here we describe the most common types of automated tests. We also describe ‘design patterns’ commonly used in test automation for improving the maintenance and extensibily of your automation suite. The more experienced reader will find these interesting if not already using these techniques.

Types of Tests¶

What parts of your application should you test? That depends on aspects of your project: user expectations, time allowed for the project, priorities set by the project manager and so on. Once the project boundaries are defined though, you, the tester, will certainly make many decisions on what to test.

We’ve created a few terms here for the purpose of categorizing the types of test you may perform on your web application. These terms are by no means standard, although the concepts we present here are typical for web-application testing.

Testing Static Content¶

The simplest type of test, a content test, is a simple test for the existence of a static, non-changing, UI element. For instance

Does each page have its expected page title? This can be used to verify your test found an expected page after following a link.
Does the application’s home page contain an image expected to be at the top of the page?
Does each page of the website contain a footer area with links to the company contact page, privacy policy, and trademarks information?
Does each page begin with heading text using the <h1> tag? And, does each page have the correct text within that header?

You may or may not need content tests. If your page content is not likely to be affected then it may be more efficient to test page content manually. If, for example, your application involves files being moved to different locations, content tests may prove valuable.

Testing Links¶

A frequent source of errors for web-sites is broken links or missing pages behind links. Testing involves clicking each link and verifying the expected page. If static links are infrequently changed then manual testing may be sufficient. However if your web designers frequently alter links, or if files are occasionally relocated, link tests should be automated.

Function Tests¶

These would be tests of a specific function within your application, requiring some type of user input, and returning some type of results. Often a function test will involve multiple pages with a form-based input page containing a collection of input fields, Submit and Cancel operations, and one or more response pages. User input can be via text-input fields, check boxes, drop-down lists, or any other browser-supported input.

Function tests are often the most complex tests you’ll automate, but are usually the most important. Typical tests can be for login, registration to the site, user account operations, account settings changes, complex data retrieval operations, among others. Function tests typically mirror the user-scenarios used to specify the features and design or your application.

Testing Dynamic Elements¶

Often a web page element has a unique identifier used to uniquely locate that element within the page. Usually these are implemented using the html tag’s ‘id’ attribute or its ‘name’ attribute. These names can be a static, i.e unchanging, string constant. They can also be dynamically generated values that vary each instance of the page. For example, some web servers might name a displayed document doc3861 one instance of a page, and ‘doc6148’ on a different instance of the page depending on what ‘document’ the user was retrieving. A test script verifying that a document exists may not have a consistent identifier to use for locating that document. Often, dynamic elements with varying identifiers are on some type of result page based on a user action. This though certainly depends on the function of the web application.

Here’s an example.

<input type="checkbox" value="true" id="addForm:_ID74:_ID75:0:_ID79:0:

checkBox"/>

This shows an HTML tag for a check box. Its ID (addForm:_ID74:_ID75:0:_ID79:0:checkBox) is a dynamically generated value. The next time the same page is opened it will likely be a different value.

Ajax Tests¶

Ajax is a technology which supports dynamically changing user interface elements which can dynamically change without the browser having to reload the page, such as animation, RSS feeds, and real-time data updates among others. There are countless ways Ajax can be used to update elements on a web page. But, the easy way to think of this is that in Ajax-driven applications, data can be retrieved from the application server and then displayed on the page without reloading the entire page. Only a portion of the page, or strictly the element itself is reloaded.

Validating Results¶

Assert vs. Verify¶

When should you use an assert command and when should you use a verify command? This is up to you. The difference is in what you want to happen when the check fails. Do you want your test to terminate, or to continue and simply record that the check failed?

Here’s the trade-off. If you use an assert, the test will stop at that point and not run any subsequent checks. Sometimes, perhaps often, that is what you want. If the test fails you will immediately know the test did not pass. Test engines such as TestNG and JUnit have plugins for commonly used development environments (Chap 5) which conveniently flag these tests as failed tests. The advantage: you have an immediate visual of whether the checks passed. The disadvantage: when a check does fail, there are other checks which were never performed, so you have no information on their status.

In contrast, verify commands will not terminate the test. If your test uses only verify commands you are guaranteed (assuming no unexpected exceptions) the test will run to completion whether the checks find defects or not. The disadvantage: you have to do more work to examine your test results. That is, you won’t get feedback from TestNG or JUnit. You will need to look at the results of a console printout or a log output. And you will need to take the time to look through this output every time you run your test. If you are running hundreds of tests, each with its own log, this will be time-consuming, and the immediate feedback of asserts will be more appropriate. Asserts are more commonly used than verifiers due to their immediate feedback.

Location Strategies¶

Choosing a Location Strategy¶

There are multiple ways of selecting an object on a page. But what are the trade offs of each of these locator types? Recall we can locate an object using

the element’s ID
the element’s name attribute
an XPath statement
by a link’s text
document object model (DOM)

Using an element ID or name locator is the most efficient in terms of test performance, and also makes your test code more readable, assuming the ID or name within the page source is well-named. XPath statements take longer to process since the browser must run its XPath processor. XPath has been known to be especially slow in Internet Explorer version 7. Locating via a link’s text is often convenient and performs well. This technique is specific to links though. Also, if the link’s text is likely to change frequently, locating by the <a> element would be the better choice.

Sometimes though, you must use an XPath locator. If the page source does not have an ID or name attribute you may have no choice but to use an XPath locator. (DOM locators are no longer commonly used since XPath can do everything they can and more. DOM locators are available simply to support legacy tests.)

There is an advantage to using XPath that locating via ID or name attributes do not have. With XPath (and DOM) you can locate an object with respect to another object on the page. For example, if there is a link that must occur within the second paragraph within a <div> section, you can use XPath to specify this. With ID and name locators, you can only specify that they occur on the page that is, somewhere on the page. If you must test that an image displaying the company logo appears at the top of the page within a header section, XPath may be the better locator.

Locating Dynamic Elements¶

As was described earlier in the Types of Tests section, a dynamic element is a page element whose identifer varies with each instance of the page. For example,

<a class="button" id="adminHomeForm" onclick="return oamSubmitForm('adminHomeForm',

'adminHomeForm:_ID38');" href="#">View Archived Allocation Events</a>

This HTML anchor tag defines a button with an ID attribute of “adminHomeForm”. It’s a fairly complex anchor tag when compared to most HTML tags, but it is still a static tag. The HTML will be the same each time this page is loaded in the browser. Its ID remains constant with all instances of this page. That is, when this page is displayed, this UI element will always have this Identifier. So, for your test script to click this button you simply need to use the following Selenium command.

click adminHomeForm

Or, in Selenium 1.0

selenium.click("adminHomeForm");

Your application, however, may generate HTML dynamically where the identifier varies on different instances of the webpage. For instance, HTML for a dynamic page element might look like this.

<input type="checkbox" value="true" id="addForm:_ID74:_ID75:0:_ID79:0:checkBox"

name="addForm:_ID74:_ID75:0:_ID79:0:checkBox"/>

This defines a checkbox. Its ID and name attributes (both addForm:_ID74:_ID75:0:_ID79:0:checkBox) are dynamically generated values. In this case, using a standard locator would look something like the following.

click addForm:_ID74:_ID75:0:_ID79:0:checkBox

Or, again in Selenium-RC

selenium.click("addForm:_ID74:_ID75:0:_ID79:0:checkBox");

Given the dynamically generated Identifier, this approach would not work. The next time this page is loaded the Identifier will be a different value from the one used in the Selenium command and therefore, will not be found. The click operation will fail with an “element not found” error.

To correct this, a simple solution would be to just use an XPath locator rather than trying to use an ID locator. So, for the checkbox you can simply use

click //input

Or, if it is not the first input element on the page (which it is likely not) try a more detailed XPath statement.

click //input[3]

click //div/p[2]/input[3]

If however, you do need to use the ID to locate the element, a different solution is needed. You can capture this ID from the website before you use it in a Selenium command. It can be done like this.

String[] checkboxids = selenium.getAllFields(); // Collect all input IDs on page.

for(String checkboxid:checkboxids) {

if(checkboxid.contains("addForm")) {

selenium.click(checkboxid);

}

This approach will work if there is only one check box whose ID contains the text ‘addForm’.

Locating Ajax Elements¶

As was presented in the Types of Tests subsection above, a page element implemented with Ajax is an element that can be dynamically refreshed without having to refresh the entire page. The best way to locate and verify an Ajax element is to use the Selenium 2.0 WebDriver API. It was specifically designed to address testing of Ajax elements where Selenium 1 has some limitations.

In Selenium 2.0 you use the waitFor() method to wait for a page element to become available. The parameter is a By object which is how WebDriver implements locators. This is explained in detail in the WebDriver chapters.

To do this with Selenium 1.0 (Selenium-RC) a bit more coding is involved, but it isn’t difficult. The approach is to check for the element, if it’s not available wait for a predefined period and then again recheck it. This is then executed with a loop with a predetermined time-out terminating the loop if the element isn’t found.

Let’s consider a page which brings a link (link=ajaxLink) on click of a button on page (without refreshing the page). This could be handled by Selenium using a for loop.

// Loop initialization.

for (int second = 0;; second++) {

// If loop reached 60 seconds then break the loop.

if (second >= 60) break;

// Search for element "link=ajaxLink" and if available then break loop.

try { if (selenium.isElementPresent("link=ajaxLink")) break; } catch (Exception e) {}

// Pause for 1 second.

Thread.sleep(1000);

}

This certainly isn’t the only solution. Ajax is a common topic in the user forum and we recommend searching previous discussions to see what others have done.

Wrapping Selenium Calls¶

As with any programming, you will want to use utility functions to handle code that would otherwise be duplicated throughout your tests. One way to prevent this is to wrap frequently used selenium calls with functions or class methods of your own design. For example, many tests will frequently click on a page element and wait for page to load multiple times within a test.

selenium.click(elementLocator);

selenium.waitForPageToLoad(waitPeriod);

Instead of duplicating this code you could write a wrapper method that performs both functions.

/**

* Clicks and Waits for page to load.

* param elementLocator

* param waitPeriod

public void clickAndWait(String elementLocator, String waitPeriod) {

selenium.click(elementLocator);

selenium.waitForPageToLoad(waitPeriod);

}

‘Safe Operations’ for Element Presence¶

Another common usage of wrapping Selenium methods is to check for presence of an element on a page before carrying out some operation. This is sometimes called a ‘safe operation’. For instance, the following method could be used to implement a safe operation that depends on an expected element being present.

/**

* Selenum-RC -- Clicks on an element only if it is available on a page.

* param elementLocator

public void safeClick(String elementLocator) {

if(selenium.isElementPresent(elementLocator)) {

selenium.click(elementLocator);

} else {

// Using the TestNG API for logging

Reporter.log("Element: " + elementLocator + ", is not available on a page - "

+selenium.getLocation());

}

This example uses the Selenium 1 API but Selenium 2 also supports this.

/**

* Selenium-WebDriver -- Clicks on an element only if it is available on a page.

* param elementLocator

public void safeClick(String elementLocator) {

WebElement webElement = getDriver().findElement(By.XXXX(elementLocator));

if(webElement != null) {

selenium.click(webElement);

} else {

// Using the TestNG API for logging

Reporter.log("Element: " + elementLocator + ", is not available on a page - "

+ getDriver().getUrl());

}

In this second example ‘XXXX’ is simply a placeholder for one of the multiple location methods that can be called here.

Using safe methods is up to the test developer’s discretion. Hence, if test execution is to be continued, even in the wake of missing elements on the page, then safe methods could be used, while posting a message to a log about the missing element. This, essentially, implements a ‘verify’ with a reporting mechanism as opposed to an abortive assert. But if an element must be available on a page in order to be able to carry out further operations (i.e. login button on home page of a portal) then this safe method technique should not be used.

UI Mapping¶

A UI Map is a mechanism that stores all the locators for a test suite in one place for easy modification when identifiers or paths to UI elements change in the AUT. The test script then uses the UI Map for locating the elements to be tested. Basically, a UI map is a repository of test script objects that correspond to UI elements of the application being tested.

What makes a UI map helpful? Its primary purpose is making test script management much easier. When a locator needs to be edited, there is a central location for easily finding that object, rather than having to search through test script code. Also, it allows changing the Identifier in a single place, rather than having to make the change in multiple places within a test script, or for that matter, in multiple test scripts.

To summarize, a UI Map has two significant advantages

Using a centralized location for UI objects instead of having them scattered throughout the script. This makes script maintenance more efficient.
Cryptic HTML Identifiers and names can be given more human-readable names improving the readability of test scripts.

Consider the following, difficult to understand, example (in Java).

public void testNew() throws Exception {

selenium.open("http://www.test.com");

selenium.type("loginForm:tbUsername", "xxxxxxxx");

selenium.click("loginForm:btnLogin");

selenium.click("adminHomeForm:_activitynew");

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

selenium.click("addEditEventForm:_IDcancel");

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

selenium.click("adminHomeForm:_activityold");

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

}

This script would be hard to follow for anyone not familiar with the AUT’s page source. Even regular users of the application might have difficulties in understanding what this script does. A better script could be:

public void testNew() throws Exception {

selenium.open("http://www.test.com");

selenium.type(admin.username, "xxxxxxxx");

selenium.click(admin.loginbutton);

selenium.click(admin.events.createnewevent);

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

selenium.click(admin.events.cancel);

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

selenium.click(admin.events.viewoldevents);

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

}

Now, using some comments and whitespace along with the UI Map identifiers makes a very readable script.

public void testNew() throws Exception {

// Open app url.

selenium.open("http://www.test.com");

// Provide admin username.

selenium.type(admin.username, "xxxxxxxx");

// Click on Login button.

selenium.click(admin.loginbutton);

// Click on Create New Event button.

selenium.click(admin.events.createnewevent);

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

// Click on Cancel button.

selenium.click(admin.events.cancel);

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

// Click on View Old Events button.

selenium.click(admin.events.viewoldevents);

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");

}

There are various ways a UI Map can be implemented. One could create a class or struct which only stores public String variables each storing a locator. Alternatively, a text file storing key value pairs could be used. In Java, a properties file containing key/value pairs is probably the best method.

Consider a properties file prop.properties which assigns as ‘aliases’ reader-friendly identifiers for UI elements from the previous example.

admin.username = loginForm:tbUsername

admin.loginbutton = loginForm:btnLogin

admin.events.createnewevent = adminHomeForm:_activitynew

admin.events.cancel = addEditEventForm:_IDcancel

admin.events.viewoldevents = adminHomeForm:_activityold

The locators will still refer to HTML objects, but we have introduced a layer of abstraction between the test script and the UI elements. Values are read from the properties file and used in the Test Class to implement the UI Map. For more on Java properties files refer to the following link.

Page Object Design Pattern¶

Page Object is a Design Pattern which has become popular in test automation for enhancing test maintenance and reducing code duplication. A page object is an object-oriented class that serves as an interface to a page of your AUT. The tests then use the methods of this page object class whenever they need to interact with the UI of that page. The benefit is that if the UI changes for the page, the tests themselves don’t need to change, only the code within the page object needs to change. Subsequently all changes to support that new UI are located in one place.

The Page Object Design Pattern provides the following advantages

1. There is a clean separation between test code and page specific code such as locators (or their use if you’re using a UI Map) and layout.

2. There is a single repository for the services or operations offered by the page rather than having these services scattered throughout the tests.

In both cases this allows any modifications required due to UI changes to all be made in one place. Useful information on this technique can be found on numerous blogs as this ‘test design pattern’ is becoming widely used. We encourage the reader who wishes to know more to search the internet for blogs on this subject. Many have written on this design pattern and can provide useful tips beyond the scope of this user guide. To get you started, though, we’ll illustrate page objects with a simple example.

First, consider an example, typical of test automation, that does not use a page object.

/***

* Tests login feature

public class Login {

public void testLogin() {

selenium.type("inputBox", "testUser");

selenium.type("password", "my supersecret password");

selenium.click("sign-in");

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("PageWaitPeriod");

Assert.assertTrue(selenium.isElementPresent("compose button"),

"Login was unsuccessful");

}

There are two problems with this approach.

There is no separation between the test method and the AUT’s locators (IDs in this example); both are intertwined in a single method. If the AUT’s UI changes its identifiers, layout, or how a login is input and processed, the test itself must change.
The ID-locators would be spread in multiple tests, in all tests that had to use this login page.

Applying the page object techniques, this example could be rewritten like this in the following example of a page object for a Sign-in page.

/**

* Page Object encapsulates the Sign-in page.

public class SignInPage {

private Selenium selenium;

public SignInPage(Selenium selenium) {

this.selenium = selenium;

if(!selenium.getTitle().equals("Sign in page")) {

throw new IllegalStateException("This is not sign in page, current page is: "

+selenium.getLocation());

}

/**

* Login as valid user

* @param userName

* @param password

* @return HomePage object

public HomePage loginValidUser(String userName, String password) {

selenium.type("usernamefield", userName);

selenium.type("passwordfield", password);

selenium.click("sign-in");

selenium.waitForPageToLoad("waitPeriod");

return new HomePage(selenium);

}

and page object for a Home page could look like this.

/**

* Page Object encapsulates the Home Page

public class HomePage {

private Selenium selenium;

public HomePage(Selenium selenium) {

if (!selenium.getTitle().equals("Home Page of logged in user")) {

throw new IllegalStateException("This is not Home Page of logged in user, current page" +

"is: " +selenium.getLocation());

}

public HomePage manageProfile() {

// Page encapsulation to manage profile functionality

return new HomePage(selenium);

}

/*More methods offering the services represented by Home Page

of Logged User. These methods in turn might return more Page Objects

for example click on Compose mail button could return ComposeMail class object*/

}

So now, the login test would use these two page objects as follows.

/***

* Tests login feature

public class TestLogin {

public void testLogin() {

SignInPage signInPage = new SignInPage(selenium);

HomePage homePage = signInPage.loginValidUser("userName", "password");

Assert.assertTrue(selenium.isElementPresent("compose button"),

"Login was unsuccessful");

}

There is a lot of flexibility in how the page objects may be designed, but there are a few basic rules for getting the desired maintainability of your test code.

Page objects themselves should never make verifications or assertions. This is part of your test and should always be within the test’s code, never in an page object. The page object will contain the representation of the page, and the services the page provides via methods but no code related to what is being tested should be within the page object.

There is one, single, verification which can, and should, be within the page object and that is to verify that the page, and possibly critical elements on the page, were loaded correctly. This verification should be done while instantiating the page object. In the examples above, both the SignInPage and HomePage constructors check that the expected page is available and ready for requests from the test.

A page object does not necessarily need to represent an entire page. The Page Object design pattern could be used to represent components on a page. If a page in the AUT has multiple components, it may improve maintainability if there is a separate page object for each component.

There are other design patterns that also may be used in testing. Some use a Page Factory for instantiating their page objects. Discussing all of these is beyond the scope of this user guide. Here, we merely want to introduce the concepts to make the reader aware of some of the things that can be done. As was mentioned earlier, many have blogged on this topic and we encourage the reader to search for blogs on these topics.

Data Driven Testing¶

Data Driven Testing refers to using the same test (or tests) multiple times with varying data. These data sets are often from external files i.e. .csv file, text file, or perhaps loaded from a database. Data driven testing is a commonly used test automation technique used to validate an application against many varying inputs. When the test is designed for varying data, the input data can expand, essentially creating additional tests, without requiring changes to the test code.

In Python:

The Python script above opens a text file. This file contains a different search string on each line. The code then saves this in an array of strings, and iterates over the array doing a search and assert on each string.

This is a very basic example, but the idea is to show that running a test with varying data can be done easily with a programming or scripting language. Additionally, this is a well-known topic among test automation professionals including those who don’t use Selenium so searching the internet on “data-driven testing” should reveal many blogs on this topic.

Database Validation¶

Another common type of testing is to compare data in the UI against the data actually stored in the AUT’s database. Since you can also do database queries from a programming language, assuming you have database support functions, you can use them to retrieve data and then use the data to verify what’s displayed by the AUT is correct.

Consider the example of a registered email address to be retrieved from a database and then later compared against the UI. An example of establishing a DB connection and retrieving data from the DB could look like this.

In Java:

// Load Microsoft SQL Server JDBC driver.

Class.forName("com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver");

// Prepare connection url.

String url = "jdbc:sqlserver://192.168.1.180:1433;DatabaseName=TEST_DB";

// Get connection to DB.

public static Connection con =

DriverManager.getConnection(url, "username", "password");

// Create statement object which would be used in writing DDL and DML

// SQL statement.

public static Statement stmt = con.createStatement();

// Send SQL SELECT statements to the database via the Statement.executeQuery

// method which returns the requested information as rows of data in a

// ResultSet object.

ResultSet result = stmt.executeQuery

("select top 1 email_address from user_register_table");

// Move cursor from default position to first row of result set.

result.next();

// Fetch value of "email_address" from "result" object.

String emailaddress = result.getString("email_address");

// Use the emailAddress value to login to application.

driver.findElement(By.id, "userID").sendKeys(emailaddress);

driver.findElement(By.id, "password").sendKeys(secretPassword);

driver.findElement(By.id, "loginButton").click();

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.xpath, "//*[contains(.,'Welcome back ')]");

Assert.assertTrue(element.getText().contains(emailaddress), "Unable to log in for user" + emailaddress)

This is a simple Java example of data retrieval from a database.

07_selenium_grid.jsp

Selenium-Grid¶

Note: We are currently working on this chapter. Presently we have introductory info here for people completely new to Selnium-Grid. Over the next few months we hope to provide useful examples and illustrations to thoroughly explain how to use Selenium-Grid.

Quick Start¶

If you’re already experienced in Selenium test automation you may simply need a quick-start to get up and running. This chapter has much information geared to many skill levels, but may be too much if you’re looking for just a quick reference to quickly try things out. For a quick-start, refer to the Selenium-Grid articles in the Selenium Wiki.

What is Selenium-Grid?¶

Selenium-Grid allows you run your tests on different machines against different browsers in parallel. That is, running multiple tests at the same time against different machines running different browsers and operating systems. Essentially, Selenium-Grid support distributed test execution. It allows for running your tests in a distributed test execution environment.

When to Use It¶

Generally speaking, there’s two reasons why you might want to use Selenium-Grid.

To run your tests against multiple browsers, multiple versions of browser, and browsers running on different operating systems.
To reduce the time it takes for the test suite to complete a test pass.

Selenium-Grid is used to speed up the execution of a test pass by using multiple machines to run tests in parallel. For example, if you have a suite of 100 tests, but you set up Selenium-Grid to support 4 different machines (VMs or separate physical machines) to run those tests, your test suite will complete in (roughly) one-fourth the time as it would if you ran your tests sequentially on a single machine. For large test suites, and long-running test suite such as those performing large amounts of data-validation, this can be a significant time-saver. Some test suites can take hours to run. Another reason to boost the time spent running the suite is to shorten the turnaround time for test results after developers check-in code for the AUT. Increasingly software teams practicing Agile software development want test feedback as immediately as possible as opposed to wait overnight for an overnight test pass.

Selenium-Grid is also used to support running tests against multiple runtime environments, specifically, against different browsers at the same time. For example, a ‘grid’ of virtual machines can be setup with each supporting a different browser that the application to be tested must support. So, machine 1 has Internet Explorer 8, machine 2, Internet Explorer 9, machine 3 the latest Chrome, and machine 4 the latest Firefox. When the test suite is run, Selenium-Grid receives each test-browser combination and assigns each test to run against its required browser.

In addition, one can have a grid of all the same browser, type and version. For instance, one could have a grid of 4 machines each running 3 instances of Firefox 12, allowing for a ‘server-farm’ (in a sense) of available Firefox instances. When the suite runs, each test is passed to Selenium-Grid which assigns the test to the next available Firefox instance. In this manner one gets test pass where conceivably 12 tests are all running at the same time in parallel, significantly reducing the time required to complete a test pass.

Selenium-Grid is very flexible. These two examples can be combined to allow multiple instances of each browser type and version. A configuration such as this would provide both, parallel execution for fast test pass completion and support for multiple browser types and versions simultaneously.

Selenium-Grid 2.0¶

Selenium-Grid 2.0 is the latest release as of the writing of this document (5/26/2012). It is quite different from version 1 of Selenium-Grid. In 2.0 Selenium-Grid was merged with the Selenium-RC server. Now, you only need to download a single .jar file to get the remote Selenium-RC-Server and Selenium-Grid all in one package.

How Selenium-Grid Works–With a Hub and Nodes¶

A grid consists of a single hub, and one or more nodes. Both are started using the selenium-server.jar executable. We’ve listed some examples in the following sections of this chapter.

The hub receives a test to be executed along with information on which browser and ‘platform’ (i.e. WINDOWS, LINUX, etc) where the test should be run. It ‘knows’ the configuration of each node that has been ‘registered’ to the hub. Using this information it selects an available node that has the requested browser-platform combination. Once a node has been selected, Selenium commands initiated by the test are sent to the hub, which passes them to the node assigned to that test. The node runs the browser, and executes the Selenium commands within that browser against the application under test.

Installation¶

Installation is simple. Download the Selenium-Server jar file from the SeleniumHq website’s download page. You want the link under the section “Selenium-Server (formerly Selenium-RC)”.

Install it in a folder of your choice. You’ll need to be sure the java executable is on your execution path so you can run it from the command-line. If it does not run correcly, verify your system’s path variable includes the path to the java.exe.

Starting Selenium-Grid¶

Generally you would start a hub first since nodes depend on a hub. This is not abolutely necessary however, since nodes can recognize when a hub has been started and vice-versa. For learning purposes though, it would easier to start the hub first, otherwise you’ll see error messages that may not want to start off with your first time using Selenium-Grid.

Starting a Hub¶

To start a hub with default parameters, run the following command from a command-line shell. This will work on all the supported platforms, Windows Linux, or Mac OSX.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar -role hub

This starts a hub using default parameter values. We’ll explain these parameters in folowing subsections. Note that you will likely have to change the version number in the jar filename depending on which version of the selenium-server you’re using.

Starting a Node¶

To start a node using default parameters, run the following command from a command-line.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar -role node -hub http://localhost:4444/grid/register

This assumes the hub has been started above using default parameters. The default port the hub uses to listen for new requests is port 4444. This is why port 4444 was used in the URL for locating the hub. Also the use of ‘localhost’ assumes your node is running on the same machine as your hub. For getting started this is probably easiest. If running the hub and node on separate machines, simply replace ‘localhost’ with the hostname of the remote machine running the hub.

WARNING: Be sure to turn off the firewalls on the machine running your hub and nodes. Otherwise you may get connection errors.

Configuring Selenium-Grid¶

Default Configuration¶

JSON Configuration File¶

Configuring Via the Command-Line Options¶

Hub Configuration¶

To run the hub using the default options simply specify -role hub to the Selenim-Server

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar -hub

You should see the following logging output.

Jul 19, 2012 10:46:21 AM org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher main

INFO: Launching a selenium grid server

2012-07-19 10:46:25.082:INFO:osjs.Server:jetty-7.x.y-SNAPSHOT

2012-07-19 10:46:25.151:INFO:osjsh.ContextHandler:started o.s.j.s.ServletContextHandler{/,null}

2012-07-19 10:46:25.185:INFO:osjs.AbstractConnector:Started SocketConnector@0.0.0.0:4444

Specifying the Port¶

The default port used by the hub is 4444. The port being referred to here, is the TCP/IP port used when the ‘client’, that is, the automated tests connect to the Selenium-Grid hub. If another application on your computer is already using this port, or if, you already have a Selenium-Server started, you’ll see the following message in the log output.

10:56:35.490 WARN - Failed to start: SocketListener0@0.0.0.0:4444

Exception in thread "main" java.net.BindException: Selenium is already running on port 4444. Or some other service is.

If this occurs you can either shutdown the other process that is using port 4444, or you can tell Selenium-Grid to use a different port for its hub. Use the -port option for changing the port used by the hub.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar -role hub -port 4441

This will work even if another hub is already running on the same machine, that is, as long as they’re both not using port 4441.

You may, however, want to see what process is using port 4444 so you can allow the hub to use the default. To see the ports used by all running programs on your machine use the command.

netstat -a

This should work on all supported systems, Unix/Linux, MacOs, and Windows although additional options beyond -a may be required. Basically you need to display the process ID along with the port. In Unix you may ‘grep’ the output (use a pipe) from the port number to only display those records you’re concerned with.

Node Configuration¶

Timing Parameters¶

Customizing the Grid¶

Adding custom servlets at the hub and/or node¶

The Grid lets you define your own servlets and then plug them into either the Hub (or) into the node. This lets you either add customizations at the hub side (or) at the node side. Lets take an example use case to understand this customization need a bit more in detail.

For the purpose of debugging, we would like to have access to the logs generated by all the nodes. The only problem is that we would need to enable logging into each of the machines where the nodes run. Instead of this we can build a custom solution by adding servlets at both the hub and the node.

This would be a very good use case for us to customize the Hub. We first start off by creating a custom servlet. All servlets (be it for the Hub or for the Node) can be created by either extending:

org.openqa.grid.web.servlet.RegistryBasedServlet (or)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.

Extend org.openqa.grid.web.servlet.RegistryBasedServlet when you need access to the internals of the Hub (for e.g., its org.openqa.grid.internal.Registry which is the heart of the Hub) and extend javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet if you don’t need access to the Hub internals.

So for our example, lets say we are creating two servlets.

A servlet ( lets call it as org.openqa.demo.AllNodes ) to be injected at the hub. When this servlet is invoked, it would list out all the nodes that are registered to the Hub and
A servlet ( lets call it as org.openqa.demo.NodeLog ) to be injected into the node. When this servlet is invoked, it would read the logs from the node and serve it as a web page. For the sake of simplicity we are not going to be deliving into how to have the node redirect all its logging to a log file.

Now you need to build a jar file (lets assume its called myservlets.jar) that contains both the above mentioned classes (AllNodes and NodeLog).

From the directory where both myservlets.jar and selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar exist, start the hub by running the command

java -cp *:. org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher -role hub -servlets org.openqa.demo.AllNodes

This command causes the Grid to be spawned and our new servlet gets added to the Hub. It can be accessed via http://localhost:4444/grid/admin/AllNodes

From the directory where both myservlets.jar and selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar exist, start the node by running the command

java -cp *:. org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher -role node -hub http://localhost:4444/grid/register -servlets org.openqa.demo.AllNodes

This command causes the Node to be spawned and our new servlet gets added to the node. It can be accessed via http://xxx:5555/extra/NodeLog where xxx represents the machine name/ip where the node is running.

Points to remember:

Assuming that the Hub is running on port 4444 all servlets added to the hub are accessible under http://xxx:4444/admin/ path and
Assuming that the node is running on port 5555 all serlvets added to the node are accessible under http://xxx:5555/extra/ path.

Adding a custom Proxy¶

There can be situations wherein you would like to build some custom logic at each of the nodes such as “auto restart” (or) “start/stop video recording” etc., In these kind of situations you would go about building your own custom proxy and then injecting it into the Grid system.

Here’s how you would go about doing it.

Start off by extending org.openqa.grid.selenium.proxy.DefaultRemoteProxy and define your custom functionality in it.
Build a jar ( lets call the jar as myproxy.jar ) that includes your custom proxy ( For the sake of simiplicity lets assume our custom proxy is going to be called as org.openqa.grid.MyProxy ).
From the directory where both myproxy.jar and selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar exist, start the hub by running the command.

java -cp *:. org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher -role hub

From the directory where both myproxy.jar and selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar exist, start the node by running the command.

java -cp *:. org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher -role node -hub http://localhost:4444/grid/register -proxy org.openqa.grid.MyProxy

Points to remember:

When working with custom proxies, make sure that proxy only adds custom functionality on top of what is defined in org.openqa.grid.selenium.proxy.DefaultRemoteProxy.
Make sure that the jar that contains your custom proxy class is available in the classpath of both the Grid Hub and the Node ( this was why we resorted to using java -cp instead of using java -jar).

Getting Command-Line Help¶

The Selenium-Server provides listings of available options with a brief description of each. Currently (summer 2012), the command-line help has some oddities, but it can be helpful if you know where to look and how to interpret the information.

The Selenium-Server provides two distinct functions, that of the Selenium-RC server and that of Selenium-Grid. These were likely written by different Selenium teams, and therefore the command-line help for each function has ended up in two different places. And, for the new user, it may not be apparent at first which of these two you are viewing.

If you simply pass a -h option as you might first assume, you get the Selenium-RC Server options but not those for Selenium-Grid.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar -h

This would give you Selenium-RC’s server options. If you want the command-line help for Selenium-Grid, you first use the -hub or -node options to tell Selenium-Server you’re interested in Selenium-Grid, and then follow with a -h.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar -role node -h

Or, for that matter, just pass a garbage argument to the -role node as follows.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar -role node xx

You will first see “INFO...” and an “ERROR” but below that you’ll get the command-line options for Selenium-Grid. We won’t list the whole output here since it’s rather long, but the first few lines look like this.

Jul 19, 2012 10:10:39 AM org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher main

INFO: Launching a selenium grid node

org.openqa.grid.common.exception.GridConfigurationException: You need to specify a hub to register to using -hubHost X -hubPort 5555. The specified config was -hubHost null -hubPort 4444

at org.openqa.grid.common.RegistrationRequest.validate(RegistrationRequest.java:610)

at org.openqa.grid.internal.utils.SelfRegisteringRemote.startRemoteServer(SelfRegisteringRemote.java:88)

at org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher.main(GridLauncher.java:72)

Error building the config :You need to specify a hub to register to using -hubHost X -hubPort 5555. The specified config was -hubHost null -hubPort 4444

Usage :

-hubConfig:

(hub) a JSON file following grid2 format.

-nodeTimeout:

(node) <XXXX> the timeout in seconds before the hub

automatically ends a test that hasn't had aby activity than XX

sec.The browser will be released for another test to use.This

typically takes care of the client crashes.

Common Errors¶

Unable to acess the jarfile¶

Unable to access jarfile selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar

This error can occur when starting up either a hub or node. This means Java cannot find the selenium-server jar file. Either run the command from the directory where the selenium-server-XXXX.jar file is stored, or specify an explicit path to the jar.

Troubleshooting¶

08_user_extensions.jsp

User-Extensions¶

NOTE: This section is close to completion, but it has not been reviewed and edited.

Introduction¶

Extending Selenium by adding your own actions, assertions and locator-strategies can be quite simple. Add JavaScript methods to the Selenium object prototype and the PageBot object prototype. On startup, Selenium will automatically look through methods on these prototypes, using name patterns to recognize which ones are actions, assertions and locators. The following examples give an indication of how Selenium can be extended with JavaScript.

Actions¶

All methods on the Selenium prototype beginning with “do” are added as actions. For each action foo there is also an action fooAndWait registered. An action method can take up to two parameters, which will be passed the second and third column values in the test. Example: Add a “typeRepeated” action to Selenium, which types the text twice into a text box.

Accessors/Assertions¶

All getFoo and isFoo methods on the Selenium prototype are added as accessors (storeFoo). For each accessor there is an assertFoo, verifyFoo and waitForFoo registered. An assert method can take up to 2 parameters, which will be passed the second and third column values in the test. You can also define your own assertions literally as simple “assert” methods, which will also auto-generate “verify” and “waitFor” commands. Example: Add a valueRepeated assertion, that makes sure that the element value consists of the supplied text repeated. The 2 commands that would be available in tests would be assertValueRepeated and verifyValueRepeated.

Prototype generates additional commands¶

All getFoo and isFoo methods on the Selenium prototype automatically result in the availability of storeFoo, assertFoo, assertNotFoo, verifyFoo, verifyNotFoo, waitForFoo, and waitForNotFoo commands. Example, if you add a getTextLength() method, the following commands will automatically be available: storeTextLength, assertTextLength, assertNotTextLength, verifyTextLength, verifyNotTextLength, waitForTextLength, and waitForNotTextLength commands.

Also note that the assertValueRepeated method described above could have been implemented using isValueRepeated, with the added benefit of also automatically getting assertNotValueRepeated, storeValueRepeated, waitForValueRepeated and waitForNotValueRepeated.

Locator Strategies¶

All locateElementByFoo methods on the PageBot prototype are added as locator-strategies. A locator strategy takes 2 parameters, the first being the locator string (minus the prefix), and the second being the document in which to search. Example: Add a “valuerepeated=” locator, that finds the first element a value attribute equal to the the supplied value repeated.

Using User-Extensions With Selenium-IDE¶

User-extensions are very easy to use with the selenium IDE.

Create your user extension and save it as user-extensions.js. While this name isn’t technically necessary, it’s good practice to keep things consistent.
Open Firefox and open Selenium-IDE.
Click on Tools, Options
In Selenium Core Extensions click on Browse and find the user-extensions. js file. Click on OK.
Your user-extension will not yet be loaded, you must close and restart Selenium-IDE.
In your empty test, create a new command, your user-extension should now be an options in the Commands dropdown.

Using User-Extensions With Selenium RC¶

If you Google “Selenium RC user-extension” ten times you will find ten different approaches to using this feature. Below, is the official Selenium suggested approach.

Example¶

Place your user extension in the same directory as your Selenium Server.
If you are using client code generated by the Selenium-IDE you will need to make a couple of small edits. First, you will need to create an HttpCommandProcessor object with class scope (outside the SetupTest method, just below private StringBuilder verificationErrors;)

HttpCommandProcessor proc;

Next, instantiate that HttpCommandProcessor object as you would the DefaultSelenium object. This can be done in the test setup.

proc = new HttpCommandProcessor("localhost", 4444, "*iexplore", "http://google.ca/");

Instantiate the DefaultSelenium object using the HttpCommandProcessor object you created.

selenium = new DefaultSelenium(proc);

Within your test code, execute your user-extension by calling it with the DoCommand() method of HttpCommandProcessor. This method takes two arguments: a string to identify the user-extension method you want to use and string array to pass arguments. Notice that the first letter of your function is lower case, regardless of the capitalization in your user-extension. Selenium automatically does this to keep common JavaScript naming conventions. Because JavaScript is case sensitive, your test will fail if you begin this command with a capital. inputParams is the array of arguments you want to pass to the JavaScript user-extension. In this case there is only one string in the array because there is only one parameter for our user extension, but a longer array will map each index to the corresponding user-extension parameter. Remember that user extensions designed for Selenium-IDE will only take two arguments.

string[] inputParams = {"Hello World"};

proc.DoCommand("alertWrapper", inputParams);

Start the test server using the -userExtensions argument and pass in your user-extensions.js file.

java -jar selenium-server.jar -userExtensions user-extensions.js

using System;

using System.Text;

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

using System.Threading;

using NUnit.Framework;

using Selenium;

namespace SeleniumTests

{

[TestFixture]

public class NewTest

{

private ISelenium selenium;

private StringBuilder verificationErrors;

private HttpCommandProcessor proc;

[SetUp]

public void SetupTest()

{

proc = new HttpCommandProcessor("localhost", 4444, "*iexplore", "http://google.ca/");

selenium = new DefaultSelenium(proc);

//selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*iexplore", "http://google.ca/");

selenium.Start();

verificationErrors = new StringBuilder();

}

[TearDown]

public void TeardownTest()

{

try

{

selenium.Stop();

}

catch (Exception)

{

// Ignore errors if unable to close the browser

}

Assert.AreEqual("", verificationErrors.ToString());

}

[Test]

public void TheNewTest()

{

selenium.Open("/");

string[] inputParams = {"Hello World",};

proc.DoCommand("alertWrapper", inputParams);

}

appendix_installing_dotnet_driver_client.jsp

.NET client driver configuration¶

.NET client Driver can be used with Microsoft Visual Studio. To Configure it with Visual Studio do as Following.

Launch Visual Studio and navigate to File > New > Project.

Select Visual C# > Class Library > Name your project > Click on OK button.

A Class (.cs) is created. Rename it as appropriate.

Under right hand pane of Solution Explorer right click on References > Add References.

Select following dll files - nmock.dll, nunit.core.dll, nunit.framework.dll,ThoughtWorks. Selenium.Core.dll, ThoughtWorks.Selenium.IntegrationTests.dll, ThoughtWorks.Selenium.UnitTests.dll and click on Ok button

With This Visual Studio is ready for Selenium Test Cases.

appendix_installing_java_driver_Sel20_via_maven.jsp
Importing Sel2.0 Project into Eclipse using Maven¶

Once you have created your pom.xml file in your project, you can
have maven autogenerate the project files necessary for eclipse with a simple
command:

mvn eclipse:eclipse

Then open eclipse. Choose your workspace or create a new one. Once the Eclipse IDE loads, do the following:

# File -> Import... # General -> Existing Projects into Workspace # Click next # Next to “Select root Directory:” click “Browse” button # locate the project folder containing your pom.xml and click ok. # Your project should appear in the “Projects” box already # click finish

If you haven’t already, install the m2eclipse plugin then right click on your project and select Maven -> Enable Dependency Management.

Importing Sel2.0 Project into IntelliJ Using Maven¶

We are currently working on this appendix. The information provided here is accurate, although it may not be finished.

In this appendix we provide the steps, including screen captures, showing how to create a Selenium 2.0 java client-driver project in IntelliJ IDEA. These steps assume you have already used maven with a pom.xml file to set up the project. This process is described in the Selenium 2.0 chapter. You must have followed that process before you can perform these steps. This appendix then shows you how to import the maven-created Selenium 2.0 java project into IntelliJ.

First, open IntelliJ and from the entry page, click Create New Project.

From the New Project dialog select Import Project from External Model.

From the list of project types, select maven.

Now you will see a dialog allowing you to set project options including the project’s root directory.

Click the ‘...’ button to set the root folder.

Now the settings dialog will show the directory you just selected.

This next dialog shows the name of your maven project as specified in the pom.xml file. Select your maven project and continue.

Enter a name for your project.

Once your project has been imported it should look like this in IntelliJ.

The maven project download many dependencies (libraries) when you originally ran ‘mvn install’. Now in IntelliJ you can see all these libraries. These next two screen captures shows the libraries you should now have in your project.

Before you can start writing Selenium code, you still need to create a module and at least one Java class (a .java file). First select the Project’s root in IntelliJ and right click.

And select Create Module.

In the dialog select the radio button Create Module From Scratch.

Select Java Module and enter a name for the new module.

And next, you must create a folder for the source code. By convention this is almost always named ‘src’.

Now we’re on the last dialog. Typically you don’t need to select any ‘technollogies’ here. Unless you know for a fact you will be using Groovy or some other technology.

Now that the module is created, your project should show the following structure.

Finally, you need to create a .java file with a corresponding java class.

Enter the class name.

The .java file should now be created. It should look like this in your project.

If your project now looks like the one displayed above, you’re done, congrats! And hope you enjoy coding your first Selenium automation!

appendix_migrating_from_rc_to_webdriver.jsp

Migrating From Selenium RC to Selenium WebDriver¶

How to Migrate to Selenium WebDriver¶

A common question when adopting Selenium 2 is what’s the correct thing to do when adding new tests to an existing set of tests? Users who are new to the framework can begin by using the new WebDriver APIs for writing their tests. But what of users who already have suites of existing tests? This guide is designed to demonstrate how to migrate your existing tests to the new APIs, allowing all new tests to be written using the new features offered by WebDriver.

The method presented here describes a piecemeal migration to the WebDriver APIs without needing to rework everything in one massive push. This means that you can allow more time for migrating your existing tests, which may make it easier for you to decide where to spend your effort.

This guide is written using Java, because this has the best support for making the migration. As we provide better tools for other languages, this guide shall be expanded to include those languages.

Why Migrate to WebDriver¶

Moving a suite of tests from one API to another API requires an enormous amount of effort. Why would you and your team consider making this move? Here are some reasons why you should consider migrating your Selenium Tests to use WebDriver.

Smaller, compact API. WebDriver’s API is more Object Oriented than the original Selenium RC API. This can make it easier to work with.
Better emulation of user interactions. Where possible, WebDriver makes use of native events in order to interact with a web page. This more closely mimics the way that your users work with your site and apps. In addition, WebDriver offers the advanced user interactions APIs which allow you to model complex interactions with your site.
Support by browser vendors. Opera, Mozilla and Google are all active participants in WebDriver’s development, and each have engineers working to improve the framework. Often, this means that support for WebDriver is baked into the browser itself: your tests run as fast and as stably as possible.

Before Starting¶

In order to make the process of migrating as painless as possible, make sure that all your tests run properly with the latest Selenium release. This may sound obvious, but it’s best to have it said!

Getting Started¶

The first step when starting the migration is to change how you obtain your instance of Selenium. When using Selenium RC, this is done like so:

Selenium selenium = new DefaultSelenium(

    "localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://www.yoursite.com");

selenium.start();

This should be replaced like so:

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

Selenium selenium = new WebDriverBackedSelenium(driver, "http://www.yoursite.com");

Once you’ve done this, run your existing tests. This will give you a fair idea of how much work needs to be done. The Selenium emulation is good, but it’s not completely perfect, so it’s completely normal for there to be some bumps and hiccups.

Next Steps¶

Once your tests execute without errors, the next stage is to migrate the actual test code to use the WebDriver APIs. Depending on how well abstracted your code is, this might be a short process or a long one. In either case, the approach is the same and can be summed up simply: modify code to use the new API when you come to edit it.

If you need to extract the underlying WebDriver implementation from the Selenium instance, you can simply cast it to WrapsDriver:

WebDriver driver = ((WrapsDriver) selenium).getWrappedDriver();

This allows you to continue passing the Selenium instance around as normal, but to unwrap the WebDriver instance as required.

At some point, you’re codebase will mostly be using the newer APIs. At this point, you can flip the relationship, using WebDriver throughout and instantiating a Selenium instance on demand:

Selenium selenium = new WebDriverBackedSelenium(driver, baseUrl);

Common Problems¶

Fortunately, you’re not the first person to go through this migration, so here are some common problems that others have seen, and how to solve them.

Clicking and Typing is More Complete¶

A common pattern in a Selenium RC test is to see something like:

selenium.type("name", "exciting tex");

selenium.keyDown("name", "t");

selenium.keyPress("name", "t");

selenium.keyUp("name", "t");

This relies on the fact that “type” simply replaces the content of the identified element without also firing all the events that would normally be fired if a user interacts with the page. The final direct invocations of “key*” cause the JS handlers to fire as expected.

When using the WebDriverBackedSelenium, the result of filling in the form field would be “exciting texttt”: not what you’d expect! The reason for this is that WebDriver more accurately emulates user behavior, and so will have been firing events all along.

This same fact may sometimes cause a page load to fire earlier than it would do in a Selenium 1 test. You can tell that this has happened if a “StaleElementException” is thrown by WebDriver.

WaitForPageToLoad Returns Too Soon¶

Discovering when a page load is complete is a tricky business. Do we mean “when the load event fires”, “when all AJAX requests are complete”, “when there’s no network traffic”, “when document.readyState has changed” or something else entirely?

WebDriver attempts to simulate the original Selenium behavior, but this doesn’t always work perfectly for various reasons. The most common reason is that it’s hard to tell the difference between a page load not having started yet, and a page load having completed between method calls. This sometimes means that control is returned to your test before the page has finished (or even started!) loading.

The solution to this is to wait on something specific. Commonly, this might be for the element you want to interact with next, or for some Javascript variable to be set to a specific value. An example would be:

Wait<WebDriver> wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 30);

WebElement element= wait.until(visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("some_id")));

Where “visibilityOfElementLocated” is implemented as:

public ExpectedCondition<WebElement> visibilityOfElementLocated(final By locator) {

  return new ExpectedCondition<WebElement>() {

    public WebElement apply(WebDriver driver) {

      WebElement toReturn = driver.findElement(locator);

      if (toReturn.isDisplayed()) {

        return toReturn;

      return null;

};

This may look complex, but it’s almost all boiler-plate code. The only interesting bit is that the “ExpectedCondition” will be evaluated repeatedly until the “apply” method returns something that is neither “null” nor Boolean.FALSE.

Of course, adding all these “wait” calls may clutter up your code. If that’s the case, and your needs are simple, consider using the implicit waits:

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

By doing this, every time an element is located, if the element is not present, the location is retried until either it is present, or until 30 seconds have passed.

Finding By XPath or CSS Selectors Doesn’t Always Work, But It Does In Selenium 1¶

In Selenium 1, it was common for xpath to use a bundled library rather than the capabilities of the browser itself. WebDriver will always use the native browser methods unless there’s no alternative. That means that complex xpath expressions may break on some browsers.

CSS Selectors in Selenium 1 were implemented using the Sizzle library. This implements a superset of the CSS Selector spec, and it’s not always clear where you’ve crossed the line. If you’re using the WebDriverBackedSelenium and use a Sizzle locator instead of a CSS Selector for finding elements, a warning will be logged to the console. It’s worth taking the time to look for these, particularly if tests are failing because of not being able to find elements.

There is No Browserbot¶

Selenium RC was based on Selenium Core, and therefore when you executed Javascript, you could access bits of Selenium Core to make things easier. As WebDriver is not based on Selenium Core, this is no longer possible. How can you tell if you’re using Selenium Core? Simple! Just look to see if your “getEval” or similar calls are using “selenium” or “browserbot” in the evaluated Javascript.

You might be using the browserbot to obtain a handle to the current window or document of the test. Fortunately, WebDriver always evaluates JS in the context of the current window, so you can use “window” or “document” directly.

Alternatively, you might be using the browserbot to locate elements. In WebDriver, the idiom for doing this is to first locate the element, and then pass that as an argument to the Javascript. Thus:

String name = selenium.getEval(

    "selenium.browserbot.findElement('id=foo', browserbot.getCurrentWindow()).tagName");

becomes:

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("foo"));

String name = (String) ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript(

    "return arguments[0].tagName", element);

Notice how the passed in “element” variable appears as the first item in the JS standard “arguments” array.

Executing Javascript Doesn’t Return Anything¶

WebDriver’s JavascriptExecutor will wrap all JS and evaluate it as an anonymous expression. This means that you need to use the “return” keyword:

String title = selenium.getEval("browserbot.getCurrentWindow().document.title");

becomes:

((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("return document.title;");

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