selenium quickstart tips

By using Selenium (http://www.seleniumhq.org/), you can automate browsers and it is a good practice to use the tool to do some integration testing.. There are many tutorials about this on the web, the following worked for me:

• Selenium IDE Demo - Quick Beginner's Tutorial  mentions the Firefox plugin which records and plays tests. Selenium IDE is useful, you can easily save and replay tests as html files, but i want my tests written in java and want to run them as junit tests.
• The following three videos by Absoft Training  are great!!
• Selenium Tutorial - Starting with Selenium WebDriver – Part 1 mentions WebDriver interface and illustrates to write basic test in java. It also shows how to use it for cross browser testing.
• Selenium Tutorial - Starting with Selenium WebDriver – Part 2 explains WebElement in detail and shows how to locate an element on the web page.
• Using XPath to Locate Web Elements - in very detail shows how to locate an element by xpath.

Absoft Training presents more tutorials here: http://www.absofttrainings.com/selenium-training-free-videos/ 

My usage tips :

• Download Selenium standalone server and the java client.
• In Eclipse create a java project and add the downloaded jars (must be 2 jars) to classpath.
• Download Selenium IDE and install it as Firefox plugin.
• Run the server and deploy your application to test.
• Open Firefox, start Selenium IDE, press record button and enter your web application url.
• Test your application, one use case at a time.
• Close Selenium recording, save it and export test case as Java / Junit 4/ WebDriver.
• I did not use the immediately exported files. But, i got help from them. I think preparing a utility file which enables you to switch between browser types, between development and production environments is convenient. If you have a complicated web page, it is good practice to write find methods for web elements and reuse them.
• Then run tests as junit.

Some technical tips:

• WebDriver interface provides many methods including findElement(), getTitle(), close(), getCurrentUrl() etc. It is good to examine its javadoc.
• You can locate a web element by id, name or xpath.
• To create Firefox driver, simply :
• WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
• To create Chrome driver, download the third party executable
• System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path_to_executable");
• WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
• To create IE driver, download the third party executable
• System.setProperty("webdriver.ie.driver", "path_to_executable");
• WebDriver driver = new InternetExplorerDriver();
• To make same arrangements:
• driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
• driver.manage().window().maximize(); // maximizes opening browser
• Selenium sees everything on a web page as web element.
• findElement retrieves first one that matches
• findElements retrieves all elements that match
• You can locate by
• Id
• Name
• LinkText (text of hyperlink)
• PartialLinkText
• Xpath (ultimate solution, when others don't work)
• ByXpath("//input[@placeholder='Email']") means locate an input field whose placeholder attribute value is Email.
• CssSelector
• TagName
• ClassName
• Locating by Xpath
• Xpath-Absolute: not recommended.
• //html/body/tag1[index]/..
• Xpath-Attributes: best when can't use id or name
• //input[@id='Pass' and @placeholder='Password']
• //input[contains(@id, 'user')] 
• //input[starts-with(@id, 'user')] 
• Selenium IDE and Firefox developer tools can help to get the xpath of the element.
• Xpath-Relative: best for table cells
• //table[@id='xtable']/tbody/tr[3]/td[2]
• You can make Selenium to wait for the presence of some element:
• final WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 60);
• wait.until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.id("the_id")));

A test case template:

// create driver for the browser you want
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

//open homepage
driver.get("the_url");

//find related field, enter some value
driver.findElement(By.[id|name|xpath]("the_value")).[clear()|click()|sendKeys("..")];

//find command button and click
driver.findElement(By.id("the_id")).click();

//assert results