Selenium IDE, or Selenium Integrated Test Environment runs as a Firefox plugin. Select it from the Tools menu of Firefox and it opens as a new test window. Let us take a look at the various features of Selenium IDE.
Menu Bar
Contains a list of Drop down menus:
- File menu contains Test Case and Test Suite (collection of Test Cases) options to add, open, save, or export a Test Case or Suite in a language of your choice.
- Edit menu for copying, pasting, deleting, undoing, and selecting operations to edit commands in your Test Case.
- Options menu allows you to change various settings of Selenium IDE. This includes setting the command timeout value, adding user-extensions defined by the user to the
Selenium commands’ base set, and specifying the language in which Test Cases are saved. - Help menu is simply the standard Firefox Help menu with only ‘UI-Element Documentation’ unique for Selenium-IDE.
Toolbar
The toolbar has buttons to control Test Case Execution, with a step feature to debug your Test Cases.
- Speed Control Slider: To control the running speed of your Test Cases.
- Run All: To run the complete Test Suite when multiple Test Cases are loaded.
- Run: To run the selected test only. Run and Run All buttons perform the same action if only one Test Case is loaded.
- Pause/Resume: To stop and restart a running Test Case.
- Step: This runs a Test Case one command at a time allowing you to ‘step’ through it. This is used to debug Test Cases.
- TestRunner Mode: Runs the Test Case in a browser which is loaded with Selenium-Core TestRunner. This button evaluates Test Cases for backward compatibility with TestRunner.
- Apply Rollup Rules: This advanced feature is to allow grouping of repetitive Selenium command sequences into one single action.
- Record: To record the browser actions of the user.
Test Case Pane
The Test Case Pane displays the script you write. It contains two tabs, Table and Source.
- Table: Displays commands and their parameters in an easily readable ‘table’ format.
- Source: Displays the Test Case in the native format which the file is stored in. This is HTML by default, but you can change it to another programming language like C# or Java, or scripting language like Python. The Source tab also allows you to edit the raw Test Case, including cut, copy, and paste operations.
The entry fields Command, Target, and Value display the selected command and its parameters. You can change the selected command in these fields. A drop-down list is filled based on the characters typed in the Command field and you can select the command you need from the list.
Log/Reference/UI-Element/ Rollup Pane
The bottom pane performs different functions in each of its four tabs.
Log:
Information messages showing progress and error messages are displayed under the Log tab when the Test Case is run. These messages are useful during Test Case debug operations. It has a Clear button to clear Log, and an Info button as a drop-down which allows you to select the levels of information to log.
Reference:
Reference tab is selected by default when entering or changing Selenese commands in Table mode. In Table mode, the Reference pane will display documentation on the current command. The first command parameter specified in the Reference tab always goes to the Target field of the Test pane, and the second parameter specified in the Reference tab goes to the Value field of Test pane.
UI-Element and Rollup:
These two tabs cover more advanced features of Selenium IDE and more information is detailed in the UI-Element Documentation under the Selenium-IDE Help menu.