Starting with Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for building selenium test cases.It is a firefox add-on that allows recording and playing back of tests.It is a very powerful tool for automating web sites and is very easy to use. Since it is only available with firefox it cant be used to run the tests on any other browser.

To start with Selenium you need to install the following

1. JRE : Selenium server needs the java runtime env version 1.5 or higher in order to start.Try running the command : java -version from your command prompt. If your version is 1.5 or higher you are good to go else you will have to install it or add it to your PATH env.

2. Firefox: Install a firefox version greater than 2.0. You can download it here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/



3. Selenium IDE: Using the firefox browser install ide. You can download it here: http://seleniumhq.org/download/



Open a new firefox window and click on Tools.If you see Selenium IDE there you are all set. You have installed Selenium IDE.

Recording your script

1. Open a site say www.google.com using firefox browser.


2. Open Selenium IDE by clicking on Tools->Selenium IDE.


3. Make sure that the red button (record)is clicked.
4. Type "selenium testing" in the search textfield.Click the "Google Search" button.
5. Click the first link - Selenium web application testing system.
6. Right Click and select assertTitle.
7. Stop Recording by clicking on the record button.
8. Save the script by clicking File->Save Test Case As. Make sure that you give the extension as html say give the name as "googlesearch.html".


Your script should look something like below:



Congrats!! You just recorded your first selenium script.

Playing back your script

Playback the script by pressing the play button (green triangle and one line).
Does your script run successfully?

Your script should have failed as shown below:



The script failed because selenium was trying to look for the element -"link=Selenium web application testing system" even before the page was loaded. This is one of the most common reasons why playing back a selenium script fails - trying to locate a field on a page even before the page is loaded. By adding a command -"waitForPageToLoad" this issue can be resolved.

Try running the script after adding the waitForPageToLoad command as shown below.




As you can see the script run should now be a success with all the command executions shown in green.



Congrats again!! You now played back a selenium script successfully.