QA/Execution/Web Testing/Selenium Guidelines

Here be some Selenium guidelines (mostly for writing, but include running here too).

IDE

• click vs. clickAndWait - use the latter on anything that requires network activity, but if you use the former on other buttons/links, your script will pause indefinitely
• verifyLocation - use w/regexp; otherwise it'll be absolute (I think)
  • e.g. ...
• wherever possible, use relative--not absolute--URLs in |open| commands

PHP

• Locating elements
  • xpath: for elements that have dynamically generated xpaths use 'contains'.

  for e.g. if xpath for 'remove add-on' link has the add-on ID 
  in it (id('addon-2464')/a[1]) and we do not know the add-on ID then
  we can write the xpath with 'contains'
  //div[@id,'addon-2464'][2]/a[1]) => //div[contains(@id,'addon- ')][2]/a[1]

• • If you want to match on the text in an element

  //a[text()=’My Text’]: matches a link whose text is “My Text” 

• • If you want to match more than one string in attribute or text

  //a[contains(text(),’Bill’) && contains(text(), ‘Clinton’)]:matches a link   whose text contains both Bill and Clinton. You can use any xpath function or operator to create your expression

• • Find the nth element of a type

//div[position()=3]: matches the third div on the page //div[@id=’abc’]//table[position()=3]: matches the third table inside the div whose id is abc