When Selenium IDE Doesn't Work, SpiraTest Comes to the Rescue!

August 31st, 2017 by inflectra

We heard from one of our customers recently that due to breaking changes in the Firefox plugin model, Selenium IDE will no longer work. This somewhat sad news took us by surprise since we didn’t realize that Selenium IDE had not been migrated to the new WebExtensions plugin architecture. Hopefully, that will happen, but we have some good news in the meantime!

SpiraTest and RemoteLaunch already provide a solution.

What is Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run in.

The tests themselves are simple HTML tables with three columns:

open   http://www.google.com/webhp
assertTitle   Google
type q ${query}
click btnG  
waitForPageToLoad   5000
isTextPresent   ${matchtext}

The columns are as follows:

  1. The Selenium command to run (e.g., open)
  2. The target of the command (on the page)
  3. The Value to be passed to that target

With Selenium IDE, you can run these commands directly against the browser. While SpiraTest doesn't provide this exact same functionality, we do have something similar.

How to Run Selenium IDE Tests with RemoteLaunch

As described in more detail in the SpiraTest RemoteLaunch Manual, you can reuse your existing Selenium IDE tests in their standard HTML format and have SpiraTest (together with RemoteLaunch) execute them against Selenium WebDriver directly. Unlike Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver (hereafter WebDriver to avoid confusion) does continue to work with Firefox 55 and later (as well as other browsers such as Edge, Chrome, Opera, etc.).

To add your Selenium IDE script to SpiraTest, simply create a new test case, go to the Automation tab and choose the Selenium plugin from the list, enter in the path to the Selenium IDE HTML format test script and click Save:

Then once you have done that, you should install RemoteLaunch and the Selenium WebDriver plugin for RemoteLaunch:

You can now schedule and execute SpiraTest test sets using RemoteLaunch. RemoteLaunch will read the HTML file and invoke the appropriate Selenium IDE commands against WebDriver using the specified browser inside RemoteLaunch.

Embedding Selenium IDE Scripts in SpiraTest

We have shown above the most straightforward case to reuse your existing Selenium IDE test cases, simply linking to your existing HTML format tests. However, suppose you want to simply store the tests inside SpiraTest and not worry about managing files and locations. In that case, we have a simplified syntax using the Pipe (|) character to simulate the three-column tables directly inside SpiraTest.

In this syntax, you simply separate the three cells with a pipe:

open||http://www.google.com/webhp
assertTitle||Google
type|q|${query}
click|btnG
waitForPageToLoad||5000
isTextPresent||${matchtext}

To use this, change the Automation type of the script in SpiraTest to Attached (instead of Linked) and simply paste it into this script:

selenium ide firefox remotelaunch spirateam webdriver

Spira Helps You Deliver Quality Software, Faster and with Lower Risk.

Get Started with Spira for Free

And if you have any questions, please email or call us at +1 (202) 558-6885

Free Trial