The Automated Tester - Selenium Extension Tutorial

This tutorial is for those who need to learn how to create their own extensions for Selenium. The tutorial is aimed at more experienced Selenium users who understand basic JavaScript.When creating a new user extension you will need add your code to the user-extension.js file. You will need to make sure that this file is accessible to all Selenium Derivatives(Selenium IDE,Selenium Core and Selenium Remote Control).

Lets start by breaking down an extension from the user contributed section of extensions from the OpenQA Wiki

• The new user extension that you will be creating will be accessed via the Selenium API so the first thing that we need to do is create a new function within the Selenium Object. The first line of the snippet below shows that the function is part Selenium. The "do" in Selenium.prototype.doWaitForCondition shows that this will be picked up as an action within Selenium.

  Selenium.prototype.doWaitForCondition = function(script, timeout) {
 if (isNaN(timeout)) {
   throw new SeleniumError("Timeout is not a number: " + timeout);
 }

 testLoop.waitForCondition = function () {
   return eval(script);
 };

 testLoop.waitForConditionStart = new Date().getTime();
 testLoop.waitForConditionTimeout = timeout;

 testLoop.pollUntilConditionIsTrue = function () {
  try {
    if (this.waitForCondition()) {
     this.waitForCondition = null;
     this.waitForConditionStart = null;
     this.waitForConditionTimeout = null;
     this.continueCommandExecutionWithDelay();
    } else {
    if (this.waitForConditionTimeout != null) {
     var now = new Date();
     if ((now - this.waitForConditionStart) > this.waitForConditionTimeout) {
      throw new SeleniumError("Timed out after " + this.waitForConditionTimeout + "ms");
     }
    }
    window.setTimeout("testLoop.pollUntilConditionIsTrue()", 10);
     }
   } catch (e) {
    var lastResult = new CommandResult();
    lastResult.failed = true;
    lastResult.failureMessage = e.message;
    this.commandComplete(lastResult);
    this.testComplete();
    }
   };
 };
• function(script, timeout) means that your new function can handle the 2 arguments that Selenium Actions need.
• Now add the code to do the functionality that you need. Once that is done you will need to parse the result back to Selenium. We do this be creating a new variable of the type CommandResult()
•  The new variable will have access to the .failed and .passed functions to say if the test has passed or failed. You only need to do this if you are creating a new function that can influence the Pass/Fail state of the test.
  
  If your test has failed it will need a meaningful failure message. CommandResult has a property called failureMessage that will store a message that will then be printed to the Selenium derivative that you are using.
• Once your newly created extension has come to the end of its code you will need to send a message back to Selenium saying that you command is finished. You will achieve this by adding this.commandComplete(lastResult);. This is also very useful in the catch of a try...catch to say that the action is finished.
• If your newly created extension will act like an assert instead of verify you will need to make sure that you have this.testComplete(); as the last line of the try...catch block. It will terminate the action and the test. If you have this and the line is called your test will stop running and it will move onto the next test in your test suite.

If you follow these basic steps you will be able to create your own user extension for Selenium and call your functions just as if they were built in to Selenium!