Introduction to Selenium IDE

Brief Introduction Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is the simplest of the tools in the Selenium suite, and the quickest way to get started with creating scripts; however it only supports record and playback within Firefox. For automating other browsers you’ll need to use one of the more advanced Selenium tools, such as Selenium RC or Selenium 2 (or Selenium Grid if you want to run your tests in parallel), but let’s not get ahead of ourselves! 

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is the simplest framework in the Selenium suite and is the easiest one to learn. It is a Firefox plugin that you can install as easily as you can with other plugins. However, because of its simplicity, Selenium IDE should only be used as a prototyping tool. If you want to create more advanced test cases, you will need to use either Selenium RC or WebDriver.

First, let’s install Selenium IDE, which is really just an add-on for Firefox.

The Selenium-IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is an easy-to-use Firefox plug-in to develop Selenium test cases. It provides a Graphical User Interface for recording user actions using Firefox which is used to learn and use Selenium, but it can only be used with Firefox browser as other browsers are not supported.

However, the recorded scripts can be converted into various programming languages supported by Selenium and the scripts can be executed on other browsers as well.

The following table lists the sections that we are going to cover in this chapter.

Title	Description
Download Selenium IDE	This section deals with how to download and configure Selenium IDE.
Selenium IDE Features	This section deals with the features available in Selenium IDE.
Creating Selenium IDE Tests	This section deals with how to create IDE tests using recording feature.
Selenium IDE Script Debugging	This section deals with debugging the Selenium IDE script.
Inserting Verification Points	This section describes how to insert verification points in Selenium IDE.
Selenium Pattern Matching	This section deals with how to work with regular expressions using IDE.
Selenium User Extensions	The Java script that allows users to customize or add new functionality.
Different Browser Execution	This section deals with how to execute Selenium IDE scripts on different browsers.