Introduction to Selenium IDE

Introduction to Selenium IDE : Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It’s a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Also, Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run in.

Selenium IDE is not only a recording tool: it is a complete IDE. We can use its recording capability, or we may edit our scripts by hand. Furthermore, with autocomplete support and the ability to move commands around quickly. Selenium IDE is the ideal environment for creating Selenium tests for beginners with its recording capability.

Installing the plugin

We can add the plugin to Firefox by installing it from the location as shown in below picture: 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/selenium-ide/

 

 

We can check the proper installation of the plugin in the extensions page in the browser. Alternatively, we can type about:addons  in the browser address bar to get there .

 

 

We can choose the customize location for the add-on, by customizing the Firefox browser as shown in  below screen.

 

Selenium IDE main features:

Selenium IDE allows recording, editing, and debugging tests. It was previously known as Selenium Recorder.

We can automatically record and edit the scripts manually providing auto completion support and the ability to move commands quickly.

The plugin records the scripts in Selenese, a test scripting language for Selenium.

Selenese is the set of selenium commands which are used to test your web application.

We can test the broken links, existence of some object on the UI, Ajax functionality, Alerts, window, list options and lot more using selenese.

Selenese provides commands for performing actions in a browser (click a link, select an option), and for retrieving data from the resulting pages.

Recording in Selenium IDE

 

Open Firefox that has the IDE installed.
Open the base URL of the application to record.
Launch Selenium IDE.
Now perform the actions on the application as you are testing the application.
Once you are done with the recording click on the stop recording button and save the test case through the file menu.
By default it will be saved as a selenese script HTML format.