Selenium Core Extensions (User-Extensions.js)

To understand extensions, lets first understand the three pillars of selenium IDE

1. Action: What operation you are performing on UI Screen
   
2. Assessors/Assertion: What verification you do on data you get from UI

3. Locator Strategy: How can we find the element in UI.

Now, Selenium IDE has a very mature library with plenty of Actions, Assertion/Assessors and Locator Strategies.

But sometimes we need to add some more functionality to it for our project requirements. In that situation, we can expand this library by adding our custom extensions. These custom extensions are called 'User Extension'.

For example, we need an Action which can convert the text to upper case before filling it in a web element. You cannot find this Action in the default Action library. In such case you can create your own 'User Extension'. In this tutorial, we will learn how to create user extension to convert Text to Upper Case

Requirement to create Selenium user extension:

To create user extension for Selenium IDE, we need to know the basic concept of JavaScript and Java Script prototype object concept.

To create your user extension, you need to create Java script methods and add them to the selenium object prototype and PageBot object prototype.

How Selenium IDE recognizes User Extension?

After adding of User Extension to Selenium IDE when we start Selenium IDE, all of these extensions in javascript prototype get loaded, and Selenium IDE recognizes them by their name.

How to Create User Extension

Step 1) Action- all actions are started by "do", i.e. if the action is for upper case text than its name will be doTextUpperCase. When we add this action method in Selenium IDE, Selenium IDE will itself create a wait method for this action. So in this case when we create doTextUpperCase action, Selenium IDE will create a corresponding wait function as TextUpperCaseAndWait. It can accept two parameters

Example: Upper Case Text Action

Selenium.prototype.doTextUpperCase = function(locator, text) {
     // Here findElement is itself capable to handle all type of locator(xpath,css,name,id,className), We just need to pass the locator text
     var element = this.page().findElement(locator);
      
     // Create the text to type
     text = text.toUpperCase();
      
     // Replace the element text with the new text
     this.page().replaceText(element, text);
    };

Step 2) Assessors/Assertion- All assessors registered in selenium object prototype will be prefixed

by "get" or "is" Ex. getValueFromCompoundTable , isValueFromCompoundTable .It can accept two parameters, one for target and other for value field in test case.

For each Assessor, there will be corresponding verification functions prefixed by "verify," "assert" and the wait function prefix by "waitFor"

    

Example: For Upper Case Text assessors

    

Selenium.prototype.assertTextUpperCase = function(locator, text) {
     // All locator-strategies are automatically handled by "findElement"
     var element = this.page().findElement(locator);
      
     // Create the text to verify
     text = text.toUpperCase();
      
     // Get the actual element value
     var actualValue = element.value;
    
     // Make sure the actual value matches the expected
     Assert.matches(expectedValue, actualValue);
    };
    
    Selenium.prototype.isTextEqual = function(locator, text) {
     return this.getText(locator).value===text;
    };
    
    Selenium.prototype.getTextValue = function(locator, text) {
     return this.getText(locator).value;
    };

Step 3) Locator strategy- If we wish to create our own function to locate an element then

    we need to extend PageBot prototype with a function with prefix "locateElementBy."

    It will take two parameters, first will be the locator string and second will be the document

    where it needs to be searched.

    

Example: For Upper Case Text Locator

    

// The "inDocument" is a document you are searching.
    PageBot.prototype.locateElementByUpperCase = function(text, inDocument) {
     // Create the text to search for
     var expectedValue = text.toUpperCase();
      
     // Loop through all elements, looking for ones that have
     // a value === our expected value
     var allElements = inDocument.getElementsByTagName("*");
// This star '*' is a kind of regular expression it will go through every element (in HTML DOM every element surely have a tag name like<body>,<a>,<h1>,<table>,<tr>,<td> etc. ). Here our motive is to find an element which matched with the Upper Case text we have passed so we will search it with all elements and when we get match we will have the correct web element.
     for (var i = 0; i < allElements.length; i++) {
     var testElement = allElements[i];
     if (testElement.innerHTML && testElement.innerHTML === expectedValue) {
     return testElement;
     }
     }
     return null;
    };

How to use newly created core extension?

1. Go to Selenium IDE
   Click on Options -> Options…

2. In General section select the location of the newly created Selenium Core Extension
   
3. Click OK and restart Selenium IDE

4. You will find the extension in the command list

Here is a list of popular extensions/plug-in used in Selenium IDE

Name	Purpose
Favorites	To mark a test suite as favorite and execute them in one click
Flex Pilot X	For Flex based automation
FlexMonkium	For Adobe Flex based recording and playback Testing in Selenium IDE
File Logging	For saving logs in a file
Flow Control	To control test execution flow
Highlight Elements	To highlight a web control
Implicit Wait	To wait for an element for certain time limit
ScreenShot on Fail	Take a screenshot on failure
Test Results	Save test case result for a test suite in one click

You can get these all and many more from SeleniumHQ official site's download section

http://docs.seleniumhq.org/download/

Summary:

• There is three part of Selenium IDE, Action, Assessors/Assertion, Locator strategy.
• User extension is created, when Selenium IDE is not fulfilling the current requirement.
• To create user extension it is required to add javascript to selenium's object prototype.
• After creation of extension, it is required to add it in Selenium IDE and restart IDE.

Download the Selenium Core Extension used in this Tutorial