Selenium IDE commnand assertTextPresent not working - selenium

Question

I am trying to use the command "assertTextPresent" in the Selenium IDE (Firefox). I configure it this way:
Command: assertTextPresent
Target: <th align="center" abbr="Monday" scope="col" style="background-color:#EFEDF5;font-weight:normal;">Mon</th><th align="center" abbr="Tuesday" (truncated for brevity)
Value: (left empty)
From what I can tell, Selenium is not matching my "target" with the source of the rendered page because of the HTML code in it. So it always fails even though it should pass. How can I make this assert work?

Answer 1

assertTextPresent looks for a value that you specify to be somewhere, anywhere on the page. The value you passed in your target is the text IDE is looking for. It literally is looking for that entire <th> tag as "text" displayed somewhere on the page, which I am assuming it is not displayed.
The correct way to use that function would be to pass the text you are looking for in the target, for example "Mon" or whatever you are looking for. Keep in mind, this is case sensitive. Since this function doesn't care where its looking, you don't specify an actual target. I find in most cases this function to usually not have enough specificity to be reliable.
<tr>
<td>assertTextPresent</td>
<td>Mon</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
I prefer to use assertText or verifyText since it requires a target, allowing you to be more specific where to look for the text.
<tr>
<td>assertText</td>
<td>css=th[abbr="Monday"]</td>
<td>Mon</td>
</tr>
I am not entirely sure the abbr attribute would be a valid selector. There are many ways to target your element, I just use that as an easy example since it was part of your snippit.

Answer 2

if you are testing for a unique text present in a page you can use
Command: assertTextPresent
Target: your search text
here in target you put the text you want to search.
Or
if you want to check for the text present at a position you can use
Command: verifyText
Target: id,name,xpath of the position
value: your search text

Answer 3

Based on what I am seeing here you should be usingassertElementPresent instead of assertTextPresent because you are specifying a element as your target rather than just the text of that <th> element.
If you still want to use assertTextPresent you would simply have "Mon" be your target. Because it's target/argument is what it is searching for.

Answer 4

You likely want 3 parts for an assertTextPresent test:
Command: assertTextPresent
Target: //th[#abbr="Monday"]
Value: Mon
This will look in the cell that contains the attriute #abbr equal to "Monday" and see if the contents (text) is set to "Mon".
To test all the cells you would do multiple assertTextPresent commands one-after-another to test all 7 days.
If you want to go "up a level" you would do something like:
Command: assertTextPresent
Target: //tr
Value: <th align="center" abbr="Monday" scope="col" style="background-color:#EFEDF5;font-weight:normal;">Mon</th><th align="center" abbr="Tuesday" (truncated for brevity)
Normally it is best to try to select an HTML element, like by using a specific attribute, such as id="row_1" or name="first_row". Then your target would be //tr[#id="row_1"] or //tr[#name="first_row"].
Target is the "DOM search syntax" to tell Selenium IDE where to find the text you are looking for. Value is the text to be tested.