Selenium IDE is a plugin for the Firefox browser that let’s one click and record actions in the web browser. In addition, it adds options to your contextual menu (the right click menu) that helps you create tests. As a result, you can very quickly create and prototype scripts for automation.
To get started, head over to the Selenium homepage at http://seleniumhq.org and download the IDE (at the time of this writing, it’s located at http://release.seleniumhq.org/selenium-ide/1.10.0/selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi). Remember that this is a Firefox plugin so it’s vital that you download and install it in Firefox.
Once you have it installed, start it up by hitting Tools -> Selenium IDE (Ctrl + Alt + S as a keyboard shortcut, if you’d prefer).
The parts that we really need to know right now:
The Base URL field – This is where we put the URL of the web page that we want Selenium to start from. In our example case, we want to put http://www.google.com there.
The controls – Right under the Base URL field, we have the controls. From the various buttons, sliders, and toggles here, we can control the execution of our test as well as whether or not we’re actively recording.
The table – Here is where our script’s functionality will appear/live as we create it. We can also tweak our scripts and add additional commands if we desire.
For now, those are the 3 basic areas that we’re concerned about. We’ll revisit the other areas when we delve deeper in.
Toggle on the record button (the red circle on the right hand side of the controls) and switch back to Google. From now on, all actions we take in the browser will be recorded by Selenium IDE!
SeleniumIDEcompleteTest
Now if you click on the click on the ‘Play Entire Suite’ button in the controls section, Selenium IDE will playback the exact steps as well as verify that the text is present.
