Commands In Selenium

Commands

The Selenium API defines dozens of commands that can be categorized into the following:

• Actions
• Accessors
• Assertions

 Actions

• Actions are commands that change the state of the application like clicking links or buttons, select an option in a <select> or type a character sequence in a given textbox.
• Actions are available in different flavors. For instance, click(locator) will trigger a click on an element locator but you can also find:
  • clickAndWait(locator) command which will trigger a click and stop the test until the browser has finished loading a new page.
  • clickAt(locator, offset) command that also triggers a click but takes another argument: a X and Y tuple that offset the actual clicking location by X and Y pixels.
  • A combination of the above : clickAtAndWait(locator,offset) that combines the specification of an offset for the click location and waits for a new page to load.

  test with actions
  ?
  type	id=search	Donuts near my home
  ?

  • type modifies the state of the application (it modifies a test field) and so is considered as an action

  Accessors

  • Accessors inspect the state of the application and store values in variables.
  • For instance, storeCookies(variableName) stores all the cookies in use in the current page in the variable variableName.
  • To use stored variables, the syntax is ${variablename} (or storedVars['variableName'] if in a JavaScript context):

    Test with variables
    store	my_search_string	searchString
    ?
    type	id=search	${searchString}
    ?

    and if in a JavaScript code section:

    if (storedVars['variableName'] == '') {
      ...
    }

   Assertions

  • Assertions are also able to inspect the current page but:
    • They are made to return a boolean value
    • This boolean represents the conformity of the element to a desired pattern
    • Usually, the pattern represents the state of an element.
  • Assertions come into 3 flavors:
    • assert : if assertion fails, test is aborted and marked as failed : assertTitle(pattern) will fail if the title of the page doesnot correspond to the pattern argument.
    • verify : if a verification fails, the test doesnot stop but a trace will be printed in the log.
    • waitFor : these commands pause the test until a condition is satisfied or a timeout is reached.