Using selenium with Dynamic values - selenium

Question

I am working with Selenium RC.
I am giving the data manually to selenium.Like below
selenium.type("id=username","myName");
selenium.type("id=password","myPassword");
selenium.click("id=login");
But, my doubt is is there any way to get the data dynamically? Here I am giving my Name directly into selenium.type();
Is there any way to retrieve username and password from other place like textfile or excel file?
Any help?

Answer 1

Short answer - YES.
Longer answer - You need to program it. So it is not possible using Selenium IDE, but you can use Selenium Webdriver. I am doing this in Java, so I will post you little snippets of my code, how do i do it.
1) I have special Java Class to hold the user information:
public class EUAUser {
private String username;
private String password;
private boolean isUsed
public EUAUser(String uname, String pwd){
this.username = uname;
this.password = pwd;
isUsed = false;
}
public String getPassword(){
return password;
}
public String getUsername(){
return username;
}
public void lockUser(){
isUsed = true;
}
}
2) Then I have UserPool to hold all users. So far because I need only 5 different users, I do it by quick and dirty approach:
public class UserPool {
private List<EUAUser> userList = new ArrayList<EUAUser>();
public UserPool(){
userList.add(new EUAUser("firstUser","a"));
userList.add(new EUAUser("MyUsername", "a"));
userList.add(new EUAUser("TestUser", "a"));
userList.add(new EUAUser("TSTUser2", "a"));
}
public EUAUser getNextUser() throws RuntimeException {
for(EUAUser user: userList){
if (!user.isUsed()){
user.lockUser();
return user;
}
}
throw new RuntimeException("No free user found.");
}
3) In tests I have something like this
UserPool pool = new UserPool();
EUAUser user = pool.getNextUser();
selenium.type("id=username", user.getUserName());
selenium.type("id=password", user.getPassword());
selenium.click("id=login");
The above code does
Add all known users to the UserPool
Retreive one free user from the pool
logs him into the app under username and password
In my case its really quick and dirty approach, but you can have list of users in file and load them into the UserPool using fileReader or something. Just giving you idea how you can do this ;)