Selenium IDE Commands for Automation of Practice Form

1. There are 4 different Selenium Variants

First of all I would like to tell you that there are different variants of Selenium, so don’t get confused.

1. Selenium IDE - It’s a record and play tool, comes as plugin with Firefox only. No coding is required if you want to automate using this tool. But it can only be used for some very basic automation. As you cannot write your own logic or you won’t be able to put conditions or loops in your automation test script.

2. Selenium RC - RC stands for remote control. We have to write code using RC and it supports a number of languages. But it’s outdated now and there is no support available for RC.

3. Selenium Webdriver - Selenium Webdriver is web automation tool which can be used with different languages like Java, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby, Perl etc. It’s the successor of RC. Different architecture as what RC had (Not going in details).

4. Selenium Grid - Used for parallel execution of test cases (not an automation tool)

2. Selenium IDE Commands for Automation of Practice Form

In this section of the post, you will learn to automate most common actions that a QA perform quite often while web testing. 

General actions are: type, click on links, select dropdown option, multi-select, checking radio buttons and check boxes, uploading files and clicking on buttons, moving backward and scrolling. Above mentioned actions cover 90% of our testing. And it's fortunate to have Selenium IDE supports all these actions.

List of most commonly used commands of Selenium IDE:

Commands	Description
open	To open URL
setTimeout	Setting Timeout Limit
windowMaximize	For Window Maximizing
store	Storing value in variable
echo	To print/log custom messages in console
clickAndWait	Clicking on link
goBackAndWait	To navigate backwards
type	To enter values in a text field
storeEval	Executing Javascript / Scroll
click	Checking Radio Button / Check box
select	To Select dropdown option
addSelection	For multiple selection boxes
assertTitle	To verify title

Sample Script to automate "About Me" Web Form:

Practice Form
Command	Target	Value
open	/automation-practice-form/
setTimeout	10000
windowMaximize
store	Selenium Tutorials | Demo Form for practicing Selenium Automation	EXPECTED_PAGE_TITLE
echo	"####### Clicking Link ########"
clickAndWait	link=Link Test
echo	"###### Using goBack command to navigate to previous page ######"
goBackAndWait
echo	"###### Typing First Name and Last Name ######"
type	name=firstname	Dustin
type	name=lastname	Taylor
echo	####### Performing Scroll Action #########
storeEval	selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().scrollTo(0,600)
echo	"###### Check Radio Buttons & Check boxes #######"
click	id=sex-1
click	id=exp-3
click	id=profession-1
click	id=tool-1
echo	"####### Performing File Upload Action #######
type	id=photo	C:\Users\admin\Desktop\pic.jpg
echo	####### Performing Scroll Action #########
storeEval	selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().scrollTo(0,1000)
echo	"####### Performing Select & Multi-Select Actions ########"
select	id=continents	label=Australia
addSelection	id=selenium_commands	label=Navigation Commands
addSelection	id=selenium_commands	label=Switch Commands
clickAndWait	id=submit
echo	${EXPECTED_PAGE_TITLE}
assertTitle	${EXPECTED_PAGE_TITLE}
echo	"###### PASSED - Test Completed Successfully #######"

3. Difference between Selenium IDE and Webdriver

First of all you should understand your automation needs and then only make a decision.
Let’s go through different variants of Selenium, this would make it easy for you to understand IDE and Webdriver.

1. Selenium IDE -

1. It’s a record and play tool.
2. Supports Firefox only: Comes as plugin with Firefox only, so not other browsers are supported.
3. Coding is not required: if you want to automate using this tool. It will record your tests and generate html scripts for you.
4. One can’t add coding logic in script: It can only be used for some very basic automation. As you cannot write your own logic or you won’t be able to put conditions or loops in your automation test script.
5. No code re-usability: As we cannot create methods in ide scripts which are in html.
6. Maintainability is quite high: Maintainence effort is quite high in IDE. If there are any changes in your application/software it would impact your automation scripts heavily.
7. You can click on this link to see IDE sample script - Selenium IDE Sample Script With Most Commonly Used Commands

2. Selenium Webdriver -

1. It requires coding.
2. Open Source
3. It supports Java, C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby.
4. Supports almost every browser: ff, chrome, ie, safari, opera.
5. Cross Platform: Supports every platform like Windows, Linux, Mac.
6. You can achieve code-re-usability.
7. Automation maintainence effort is less.
8. You can find Webdriver sample script here - First Selenium Webdriver Script

Happy Learning!

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