In this section, we will walk through the saved test from the IDE, which is written in a language called Selenese. We will then compare the Selenese commands to the commands written in a real programming language.
Note
The code and the step-by-step instructions on how to test it on Windows and other operating systems can be found at https://github.com/dimacus/SeleniumBestPracticesBook.
If you ever see the HTML source code of any web page, Selenese will not be a new concept for you. Selenese can simply be described as an HTML table with a table row as a test command. Let's take a closer look at it. Open the search_test.html file in your editor of choice. The whole test should look like this:
We will ignore the first five lines of the code, as it has no practical application for us at this point. On line 6, you will find the following code:
The preceding line declares the base domain URL for our tests.
Note
One of the biggest weaknesses in Selenium 1 (RC) is that it was written in JavaScript, which exposes security issues with third-party domains running arbitrary JavaScript code on any website. The security experts implemented strict rules to prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). Thus, Selenium IDE and RC will not be able to test multiple websites in a single test run.
Our next section of interest is the code on lines 14 to 18, where a single table row (tr) contains our first command in three table data (td) sections. Test lines 14 to 18 are shown here:
The first TD matches the Command column in the IDE, and in this case the command is to open a given URL.
The second TD matches the Target column in the IDE and is telling the test to open the root of the base URL from line 6.