Introduction

Selenium is a great tool for functional testing of web sites. Scripts can be written as HTML tables which Selenium will process and use to drive a web browser through your application using JavaScript.

While it is easy enough to create these html scripts, SeleniumAssistant attempts to make it even easier by:

• Allowing you to easily generate scripts while navigating your application
• Using a plain text script format instead of HTML
• Automatically generating suites by finding all the test files in a given directory

Note

Because of JavaScript cross browser security constraints, you should deploy SeleniumAssistant along side your application, on the same domain/server.

Alternatives

SeleniumRecorder is a FireFox extension that can be used for recording tests.

Installation

SeleniumAssistant is distributed as a Java Web Application (WAR). Instructions for deploying to specific J2EE Servers will vary, but instructions for Tomcat are here:

• Deploy the SeleniumAssistant WAR file to TOMCAT by copying seleniumassistant.war to the TOMCAT_HOME/webapps directory
• Deploy Selenium to your application server using the context path of 'selenium'. Note, Selenium itself is not distributed as a WAR. An easy way to generate the WAR so it can easily be deployed to Tomcat is to:
  • Download the Selenium distribution and unzip it
  • The archive should contain a 'selenium' directory. Zip up the contents of this directory. The root of this archive should contain index.html.
  • Rename the zip file to selenium.war
• Launch SeleniumAssistant in your browser using the URL http://SERVER_NAME:PORT/seleniumassistant

Current Status (Jan 2006)

• Basic functionality for adding form fields and clicking buttons.