I just started looking into selenium for automated testing for the past few days and am getting pretty stuck. I've been looking for documentation on this but haven't found anything very helpful but maybe one of you have found something interesting, if so I'd love to read it.
Anyway, here's the problem: I need to open up a website. This website takes in some parameters which takes the browser to another site, however if the parameters are invalid then the next site will display a message saying "An error has occurred".
If the second site doesn't error out like this we want to store a few arbitrary values and echo them later. If the site does error out we want to mark the error and move on. Right now, if the second site is invalid selenium stops running.
The only way it seems to do this is to have an if-else statement though I haven't found any mention of one in selenium. I have read somewhere that you can create some javascript on your own and then input that into selenium. The problem there is that I don't know how to actually input the javascript into selenium.
I hope that wasn't too confusing.
Thank you,
Jesse Smothermon
My coworker found it. code below:
<tr>
<td>storeEval</td>
<td>(selenium.isElementPresent("variable_looked_at")?selenium.getText("variable_looked_at"):"N/A")</td>
<td>Address</td>
</tr>
Thanks,
Jesse Smothermon
I am fairly new to selenium too, but I think what you want to do is use the Selenium IDE and export to visual studio or something. When you use selenium with visual studio (C#) you have complete control over the flow of the test. its much more easier to program something like that. but at the same time, you need to configure it with Nunit or selenium RC.
Also out there is a selenium extension called "Flow Control". I have not used it, but I believe it will allow the Selenium IDE to do if/else/etc
As a unit test, if the second site has failed, the unit test has failed. Perhaps rather than looking for a conditional processing of your unit test, fix the problem that causes the test to fail.
That may sound a little harsh and forgive me if it does, but it sounds illogical to me that you would want to take this approach.
Related
I have to input credentials and log in into page twice by using Selenium IDE. How can I do it by using if-else statement? Is there any way to do this?
You can. But your question is quite vague. Maybe you could post your code? Learn about control flow (if-else, forEach, etc.) here.
Another possible solution could be to use the recording feature of Selenium IDE. This article shows you how to create a login test.
So, I am trying to create some sort of bot to interact with Twitter. I am familiar with Cypress and wouldn´t be a problem at all learn how to deal with Selenium, but my point is: for what I´ve been reading, they´re both specific for testing, and what I want to do is not exactly testing, but keep an algorithm running for as long as I want.
I can obviously make a loop on the Cypress or the Selenium code, but I don´t see it as the easier way to deal with the problem.
So my question is: is there some ideal framework to keep pressing buttons or typing stuff for a few days on a webpage, not for testing, but to automatically interact with other accounts?
What you need is what is called an autoclicker.
Although this can be done with Selenium, there are simpler and faster alternatives like this Chrome extension: Auto Click/Auto Fill.
A search for autoclickers can help you figure out the best alternatives for your use case and there are plenty of approaches in many different languages.
I am automating the GUI using Robot framework with selinium2Library. I am using selenium IDE and I don't find any record and play option for the Robot framework.
Is it possible for record and play back option for the test cases with Robot framework using selenium2Libbrary instead of writing test cases manually?. Appreciate some early response on this one.
Looks like you might got in confusion because of the work selenium which is different when you use it in RobotFramework.
I believe that you have to write the test cases, and you may Pycharm IDE where you get the context help for the in built as well for the user written keywords when the resources are imported.
However, I remember reading in a thread, but could not trace it. Here you can find article on how you can use Selenium IDE to record, but haven't tried myself. You may try it and see how it goes for you.
But I strongly believe that if you write the test, you can organize them into different reusable keywords than depending on the recording the stuff. Good luck.
I'm trying to get started with Selenium, but it's extremely confusing for anyone who still doesn't know the project.
If I go to the Selenium download page I get 7 download links for things with different names, and no description of what is each one. And then the Selenium 2 download link points to a page with another 8 files.
What does all of that mean? Which ones are deprecated? Which files should I get?
What are the differences between version 1 and 2? Is the version 1 deprecated, or do we still need to mix some modules from version 1 together with version 2?
And then, after searching on Google, I find Which Selenium Tool Should I Use?, but it's a very outdated page (last edited in 2007). It also talks about a limitation of the JavaScript testing interface: Same Origin Policy. Does this limitation still apply nowadays?
What are "Selenium Core", "Selenium Remote Control", "Selenium IDE"?
How about "Selenium (standalone) Server"? Is it the same thing as the Remote Control, or something different? What is the difference between Selenium Remote Control and Selenium Server?
And then I reach an official FAQ that is also confusing, and talks about a WebDriver thing that was going to be part of Selenium. Is it already inside Selenium? Is that FAQ up-to-date? How does it relate with other Selenium parts?
After all, another way to understand this question is: "I've never used Selenium before, I'm completely lost, and the documentation doesn't help." What I need is an introduction of what are all the parts of the project, which ones are old and deprecated, which ones are needed, which ones are interchangeable, which ones work with different browsers...
(maybe it would be a nice idea to have a community wiki answer that tries to be as accurate and detailed as possible)
I'm not much experienced with Selenium, but recently I have started it to automate form submissions while unit testing. For starters, try Selenium IDE. It is a Firefox addon which will help you to record actions and modify/replay them.
Actually more than that. You can perform Accessor operations, which will perfom a series of recorded/configured actions and will store the end results for us to analyze later.
And then there is Assertions, which will actually check the end state of a series of actions with some pre-configured conditions.
One thing I can say you is that Selenium is very handy and easy to learn. You can write your own test cases using plain html!
Here is a great beginner video - http://wiki.openqa.org/download/attachments/400/Selenium+IDE.swf?version=1
After seeing that, read through this tutorial - http://jroller.com/selenium/
And after that, read this reference - http://release.seleniumhq.org/selenium-core/1.0/reference.html
It explains everything you need to know. If you are first to Selenium, you will be amazZzed to see what all things selenium can do.
I have been using Selenium a lot lately (testing an ExtJs app) and while in many ways it is wonderful, there are three things that cause me a lot of grief:
Inability to directly click on elements other than buttons. This has led me to write a bunch of Robot code to move the mouse around. That works but is a bit fragile, plus if you touch your mouse while a test is running, you are screwed. I tried the Selenium forums to see if there was a better way, and got nowhere. I think (but am not sure) that this is a fundamental limitation of Selenium's JS injection technique.
Inability in many cases to control what the 'id' attribute get sets to. This happens inside ExtJs and some elements let you set it, some don't, and some do but the attribute ends up where you don't expect it. You end up having to use XPath in some cases. Using XPath with ExtJs is kind of horrible as ExtJs creates massive levels of nested DIV's. You can also sometimes use CSS locators (which are also inconsistently controllable in ExtJs). (BTW, this is obviously not a Selenium problem per se).
The time that Selenium takes to fire up FF is too long... way longer than a normal human FF startup, about 2 seconds per test, which translates into tests that last several minutes, way too long.
I briefly looked at Watij, BadBoy and a couple of other web functional testing apps but none of them looked anywhere near as good as Selenium. (The way Selenium tests can be written in Java and run through jUnit is really, really sweet). There are also a few commercial alternatives but they are beyond my budget and there is no assurance that they would work any better anyway.
Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated.
About 3:
Selenium copies at startup the firefox profile to a temporary folder. If you don't specify a custom profile, Selenium propably uses the default profile which propably is bloated with addons you don't need for the test. Startup Firefox with '-p' and create a new profile for Selenium and copy it to a location you can point selenium to. This should speed up the test a bit.
Update:
Firefox Profile location / Windows: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
My thoughts:
There are some cases that click isn't enough, but you certainly shouldn't be limited to buttons. You might want to experiment further with your locators.
Why do you need to set the id attribute of elements? I have experience with testing ExtJS applications, and the problem is usually locating elements that have dynamically set ids. In my opinion this is an issue with ExtJS and not Selenium. Using smart XPath techniques using contains, starts-with, and substring can make your locators much more reliable. CSS locators are also often helpful as you mentioned.
As amarsuperstar says, you don't need to start Firefox before every test. If you do, you might want to consider using the browserSessionReuse command to speed up launching the browser. Alternatively you can use Selenium Grid to run tests in parallel.
Finally, it's well worth looking into the WebDriver API that will be in the soon to be released alpha of Selenium 2. In my experience Firefox launch times are reduced, and commands such as click are much improved.
I am not sure about the first two points, but as for the third, I don't think you need to start the browser for every test. You can use the Seleium server (a jar in the selenium directory somewhere) then point your tests to that e.g. localhost:6554 and that will only open the browser once.
With that you can have the steps in your script to start server -> run all test -> terminate server and you will only have one browser session across your tests.
My experiences (hopefully useful ;)
I've never had this problem, even with ExtJS. I have not used it with ExtJS 3.x, though. Is it possible that you are experiencing some thing as a result of your environment rather than Selenium?
UPDATE: As Dave Hunt reminded me, sometimes I've had to use mousedown/mouseup actions in lieu of "click"
I've found many clever ways to navigate using CSS locators (selenium supports most of CSS 3). In addition, you can use xpath like xpath=id('myid')//div['#class='foo'] (the ID part is crucial).
I've also never experienced this. Perhaps you can give some details about your environment?
Thanks for all the answers guys, I really appreciate it. I spent all day yesterday on this stuff and I wanted to add a couple of observations:
The way ExtJS lays stuff out can really make it hard to locate elements. For example, quite often the 'id' that you specified appears on an element that is 2-3-4 items in the DOM above the one you really want. The actual behaviour seems to vary greatly depending on the type of element. I have half a mind to write all this up for the benefit of future Se-ExtJs testers, as it all seems very trial-and-error and tedious. But ultimately it seems like it can be made to work nicely. And, of course, this is in no way a reflection on Se. Whether it reflects poorly on ExtJs, I'm not really sure, but it is amazing how many DIV tags even fairly simple projects create.
This is probably a 'well OBVIOUSLY' but to anyone else doing this, I'd recommend getting comfy with XPath. It seems a bit obtuse at first but after a few hours, as noted above, you can find almost anything with it, and almost always in ways that are not overly brittle.
Happy Holidays!
Selenium is one of the backends to the TestPlan testing framework and it can address a few of these issues for you.
We don't seem to have any problems here. Our front-end uses many different locator syntaxes to locate any elements on the screen. Though if your page is complicated and Selenium truly can't do it then ours won't help you either.
We base everything on XPath, so after a while you just get used to it. There are all sorts of shortcut syntax that you can use in XPath that may help. In TestPlan scripts however you can also use variable expansion in XPaths which makes them much easier to maintain.
TestPlan caches browser sessions when possible and not otherwise requested. This helps the speed a little bit, but only so much since normally you want a fresh session for each test anyway.
TestPlan