Selenium IDE | Selenium Commands – Selenese
Selenium commands for Selenium IDE, often called selenite, are the set of commands that run tests. A sequence of these commands is a test script. Here we explain those commands in detail, and we present the many choices you have in testing web applications when using Selenium.
Selenium provides a rich set of commands for fully testing web-app in virtually any way you can imagine. The command set is often called selenese. These commands essentially create a testing language.
In selenese, one can test the existence of UI elements based on their HTML tags, test for specific content, test for broken links, input fields, selection list options, submitting forms, and table data among other things. In addition Selenium commands support testing of window size, mouse position, alerts, Ajax functionality, pop-up windows, event handling, and many other web-application features. The Command Reference lists all the available commands.
A command tells Selenium what to do. It come in three “flavors”: Actions, Accessors, and Assertions.
- 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”.
