So you want to build a set of automated tests using Selenium against your webapp. I’m going to assume you have already figured out how to launch your app and set the database into a known state.

Now, you want to write some tests that mimic visiting the website and interacting with the UI in various ways.

I’ve been playing with Selenium quite a bit recently, and I’ve assembled a short list of things that will hopefully make other people’s lives easier.

Building your Tests : Navigation

• Use Selenium IDE (Firefox Plugin) to develop the navigation flow for you. The last thing you want to be doing is debugging your navigation steps in your test case so you can get to the target. With Selenium IDE, you get your app running, and record the clicks and actions you take to get to your destination.
• When you finish recording, you can export your test as a java program, or in several other languages. Take advantage of this!
• To click on a link - if you assume you have a link like: < a xhref=" Your Text Here < / a > you can get the Selenium browser object to activate the link by issuing browser.click(”Your Text Here“);

Building your Tests: Validating Results

Selenium has XPath support, and XPath is a very powerful tool for processing HTML. But the syntax of XPath is quite arcane, and I spent waaaaaay too much time trying to decipher what was wrong with my XPath query.

• Use XPath Checker (firefox plugin) - go to the results page, and control-click to bring up the XPath Checker browser. Then you can experiment with various XPath expressions until you get the one that works for your particular page and content.
• To find if text appears anywhere on the page (also known as the quick-and-dirty method) - use assertTrue(browser.isTextPresent(”Your Text Here“));
• To find if text appears in a specific sub-location, the easiest way I have found is:
• assertEquals(”Text“, browser.getText(”//table[@id=’whatever’]//tr[2]/td[1]”));
• Selenium is smart about pulling all of the text out of a set of cells, subtags, whatever, so even if that text was nested inside a div, a span and a link, it would still find it.

Running Your Tests

• You can’t use Selenium inside your tests unless the Selenium RC Server is running - launch it before you start your tests, like you would Cargo, your database, etc.
• It’s a proxy, so you have to make sure that the port you use in your code (default: 4444) is the same as the port that Selenium server is running on.

Hopefully this will help some future person get up to speed faster.