Selenium Reference

A command is what tells Selenium what to do. Selenium commands come in three 'flavors': Actions, Accessors and Assertions. Each command call is one line in the test table of the form:

Actions are commands that generally manipulate the state of the application. They do things like "click this link" and "select that option". If an Action fails, or has an error, the execution of the current test is stopped.

Many Actions can be called with the "AndWait" suffix, e.g. "clickAndWait". This suffix tells Selenium that the action will cause the browser to make a call to the server, and that Selenium should wait for a new page to load.

Accessors examine the state of the application and store the results in variables, e.g. "storeTitle". They are also used to automatically generate Assertions.

Assertions are like Accessors, but they verify that the state of the application conforms to what is expected. Examples include "make sure the page title is X" and "verify that this checkbox is checked".

All Selenium Assertions can be used in 3 modes: "assert", "verify", and "waitFor". For example, you can "assertText", "verifyText" and "waitForText". When an "assert" fails, the test is aborted. When a "verify" fails, the test will continue execution, logging the failure. This allows a single "assert" to ensure that the application is on the correct page, followed by a bunch of "verify" assertions to test form field values, labels, etc.

"waitFor" commands wait for some condition to become true (which can be useful for testing Ajax applications). They will succeed immediately if the condition is already true. However, they will fail and halt the test if the condition does not become true within the current timeout setting (see the setTimeout action below).

Element Locators tell Selenium which HTML element a command refers to. Many commands require an Element Locator as the "target" attribute. Examples of Element Locators include "elementId" and "document.forms[0].element". These are described more clearly in the next section.

Patterns are used for various reasons, e.g. to specify the expected value of an input field, or identify a select option. Selenium supports various types of pattern, including regular-expressions, all of which are described in more detail below.

Element Locators

Element Locators tell Selenium which HTML element a command refers to. The format of a locator is:

Without an explicit locator prefix, Selenium uses the following default strategies:

Element Filters

String-match Patterns

For commands that return multiple values (such as verifySelectOptions), the string being matched is a comma-separated list of the return values, where both commas and backslashes in the values are backslash-escaped. When providing a pattern, the optional matching syntax (i.e. glob, regexp, etc.) is specified once, as usual, at the beginning of the pattern.

Selenium Actions

Selenium Accessors

Parameter construction and Variables

Whitespace Rules

HTML automatically normalizes whitespace within elements, ignoring leading/trailing spaces and converting extra spaces, tabs and newlines into a single space. When Selenium reads text out of the page, it attempts to duplicate this behavior, so you can ignore all the tabs and newlines in your HTML and do assertions based on how the text looks in the browser when rendered. We do this by replacing all non-visible whitespace (including the non-breaking space " ") with a single space. All visible newlines (<br>, <p>, and <pre>formatted newlines) should be preserved.

We use the same normalization logic on the text of HTML Selenese test case tables. This has a number of advantages. First, you don't need to look at the HTML source of the page to figure out what your assertions should be; " " symbols are invisible to the end user, and so you shouldn't have to worry about them when writing Selenese tests. (You don't need to put " " markers in your test case to assertText on a field that contains " ".) You may also put extra newlines and spaces in your Selenese <td> tags; since we use the same normalization logic on the test case as we do on the text, we can ensure that assertions and the extracted text will match exactly.

This creates a bit of a problem on those rare occasions when you really want/need to insert extra whitespace in your test case. For example, you may need to type text in a field like this: "foo ". But if you simply write <td>foo </td> in your Selenese test case, we'll replace your extra spaces with just one space.

This problem has a simple workaround. We've defined a variable in Selenese, ${space}, whose value is a single space. You can use ${space} to insert a space that won't be automatically trimmed, like this: <td>foo${space}${space}${space}</td>. We've also included a variable ${nbsp}, that you can use to insert a non-breaking space.

Note that XPaths do not normalize whitespace the way we do. If you need to write an XPath like //div[text()="hello world"] but the HTML of the link is really "hello world", you'll need to insert a real " " into your Selenese test case to get it to match, like this: //div[text()="hello${nbsp}world"].

Extending Selenium

It can be quite simple to extend Selenium, adding your own actions, assertions and locator-strategies. This is done with javascript by adding methods to the Selenium object prototype, and the PageBot object prototype. On startup, Selenium will automatically look through methods on these prototypes, using name patterns to recognise which ones are actions, assertions and locators.

The following examples try to give an indication of how Selenium can be extended with javascript.

Actions

All doFoo methods on the Selenium prototype are added as actions. For each action foo there is also an action fooAndWait registered. An action method can take up to 2 parameters, which will be passed the second and third column values in the test.

Example: Add a "typeRepeated" action to Selenium, which types the text twice into a text box.
	Selenium.prototype.doTypeRepeated = function(locator, text) {
	    // All locator-strategies are automatically handled by "findElement"
	    var element = this.page().findElement(locator);
	
	    // Create the text to type
	    var valueToType = text + text;
	
	    // Replace the element text with the new text
	    this.page().replaceText(element, valueToType);
	};
	

Accessors/Assertions

All getFoo and isFoo methods on the Selenium prototype are added as accessors (storeFoo). For each accessor there is an assertFoo, verifyFoo and waitForFoo registered. An assert method can take up to 2 parameters, which will be passed the second and third column values in the test. You can also define your own assertions literally as simple "assert" methods, which will also auto-generate "verify" and "waitFor" commands.

Example: Add a valueRepeated assertion, that makes sure that the element value consists of the supplied text repeated. The 2 commands that would be available in tests would be assertValueRepeated and verifyValueRepeated.
	Selenium.prototype.assertValueRepeated = function(locator, text) {
	    // All locator-strategies are automatically handled by "findElement"
	    var element = this.page().findElement(locator);
	
	    // Create the text to verify
	    var expectedValue = text + text;
	
	    // Get the actual element value
	    var actualValue = element.value;
	
	    // Make sure the actual value matches the expected
	    Assert.matches(expectedValue, actualValue);
	};
	

Automatic availability of storeFoo, assertFoo, assertNotFoo, waitForFoo and waitForNotFoo for every getFoo

All getFoo and isFoo methods on the Selenium prototype automatically result in the availability of storeFoo, assertFoo, assertNotFoo, verifyFoo, verifyNotFoo, waitForFoo, and waitForNotFoo commands.

Example, if you add a getTextLength() method, the following commands will automatically be available: storeTextLength, assertTextLength, assertNotTextLength, verifyTextLength, verifyNotTextLength, waitForTextLength, and waitForNotTextLength commands.
	Selenium.prototype.getTextLength = function(locator, text) {
	    return this.getText(locator).length;
	};
	
Also note that the assertValueRepeated method described above could have been implemented using isValueRepeated, with the added benefit of also automatically getting assertNotValueRepeated, storeValueRepeated, waitForValueRepeated and waitForNotValueRepeated.

Locator Strategies

All locateElementByFoo methods on the PageBot prototype are added as locator-strategies. A locator strategy takes 2 parameters, the first being the locator string (minus the prefix), and the second being the document in which to search.

Example: Add a "valuerepeated=" locator, that finds the first element a value attribute equal to the the supplied value repeated.
	// The "inDocument" is a the document you are searching.
	PageBot.prototype.locateElementByValueRepeated = function(text, inDocument) {
	    // Create the text to search for
	    var expectedValue = text + text;
	
	    // Loop through all elements, looking for ones that have 
	    // a value === our expected value
	    var allElements = inDocument.getElementsByTagName("*");
	    for (var i = 0; i < allElements.length; i++) {
	        var testElement = allElements[i];
	        if (testElement.value && testElement.value === expectedValue) {
	            return testElement;
	        }
	    }
	    return null;
	};
	

user-extensions.js

By default, Selenium looks for a file called "user-extensions.js", and loads the javascript code found in that file. This file provides a convenient location for adding features to Selenium, without needing to modify the core Selenium sources.

In the standard distibution, this file does not exist. Users can create this file and place their extension code in this common location, removing the need to modify the Selenium sources, and hopefully assisting with the upgrade process.

store	Mr	title
storeValue	nameField	surname
store	${title} ${surname}	fullname
type	textElement	Full name is: ${fullname}

store	javascript{'merchant' + (new Date()).getTime()}	merchantId
type	textElement	javascript{storedVars['merchantId'].toUpperCase()}