TOOLBAR IN IDE

Toolbar

The toolbar contains buttons for controlling the execution of your test cases, including a step feature for debugging your test cases. The right-most button, the one with the red-dot, is the record button.

  

 Speed Control: controls how fast your test case runs

Run All: Runs the entire test suite when a test suite with multiple test cases is loaded.

 Run: Runs the currently selected test. When only a single test is loaded this button and the              Run All button have the same effect.

Pause/Resume: Allows stopping and re-starting of a running test case.

Step: Allows you to “step” through a test case by running it one command at a time. Use for debugging test cases

Apply Rollup Rules: This advanced feature allows repetitive sequences of Selenium commands to be grouped into a single action. Detailed documentation on rollup rules can be found in the UI-Element       Documentation on the Help menu.

Record: Records the user’s browser actions

IDE FEATURES

Opening the IDE

•      To run the Selenium-IDE, simply select it from the Firefox Tools menu. It opens as follows with an empty script-editing window and a menu for loading, or creating new test cases. 

IDE Features

The File menu allows you to create, open, and save test case and test suite files. 

The Edit menu allows copy, paste, delete, undo, and select all operations for editing the commands in your test case.

The Actions menu allows to play test case and test suite  and  also some commands like Toggle Break point, set/clear start point, execute command.

The Options menu allows the changing of settings. You can set the timeout value for certain commands, add user-defined user extensions to the base set of Selenium commands, and specify the format (language) used when saving your test cases.

Installing the IDE

Installing the IDE

Using Firefox, first, download the IDE from the SeleniumHQ downloads page

Firefox will protect you from installing addons from unfamiliar locations, so you will need to click ‘Allow’ to proceed with the installation, as shown in the following screenshot.

Select Install Now. The Firefox Add-ons window pops up, first showing a progress bar, and when the download is complete, displays the following. 

Restart Firefox-Click on Restart Now

After Firefox reboots you will find the Selenium-IDE listed under the Firefox Tools menu. 

SELENIUM-IDE

ü  Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a prototyping tool for building test scripts.

ü  It is a Firefox plugin and provides an easy-to-use interface for developing automated tests.

ü  Selenium IDE has a recording feature, which records user actions as they are performed and then exports them as a reusable script in one of many programming languages that can be later executed.

Note: Even though Selenium IDE has a “Save” feature that allows users to keep the tests in a tablebased format for later import and execution, it is not designed to run your test passes nor is it designed to build all the automated tests you will need.

Specifically, Selenium IDE doesn’t provide iteration or conditional statements for test scripts. At the time of writing there is no plan to add such thing.

The reasons are partly technical and partly based on the Selenium developers encouraging best practices in test automation which always requires some amount of programming.

Selenium IDE is simply intended as a rapid prototyping tool. The Selenium developers recommend for serious, robust test automation either Selenium 2 or Selenium 1 to be used with one of the many supported programming languages.