Introducing Selenium Commands | Selenium Tutorial pdf

Introducing Selenium Commands

Selenium Commands – Selenese
Selenium provides a rich set of commands for fully testing your web-app in virtually any way you may 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 (available at SeleniumHQ.org) lists all the available commands.

A command is what 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] Login
The parameters are not always required. It depends on the command. In some cases both are required,
in others one parameter is required, and still in 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 may be stored in an HTML text file format. This consists of an HTML table with three columns. The first column is used to identify 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></td><td>/download/</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 DownloadsThe 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.