Using variables in Selenium IDE can be a great help when a manual test takes too long and there are values you want reuse within the test.
With the Selenium IDE command “store” you can specify a variable and its value to use later in the test suite. This will allow you to create a variable in one test case and retrieve the value in other test case, as many times as you need.
Today I’ll show you how this works by recording a Selenium test for Siteport™. Siteport is an automated migration solution that Oshyn uses to save time and resources when refactoring, redesigning or replatforming a website’s CMS.
In the first Test Case I will use the variable “MyUserName”. Then in a second test case, I’ll use the variable “MyUserName” to create a new migration with the value stored in the “MyUserName” variable.
Test Case 1: Log In to Siteport
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First I’ll record the Siteport login process in Selenium IDE:
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Now I’ll open Selenium IDE (Ctrl+Alt+S) and record the login process.
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Once this is done, we need to manually add the command “Store” to create the variable for the Username.
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Here is our information for the variable,” MyUserName”.
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I’ve also added the variable “dynamicMigrationName” that will represent the “Username + Current System Date". For this example, the “dynamicMigrationName” will have the value “QATester-MM-DD-YYYY”.
Test Case 2: Add a migration
In the second test case, I’ll add a migration in Siteport that uses the stored variable information.
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In Siteport, click on the “Add Migration” button.
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In the field where the user inserts the name of the migration, I’ll call the variable “dynamicMigrationName”.
In the type command, the value will correspond to the variable “dynamicMigrationName”:
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Now we’ll run the Test Case.
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The new migration will be created and the name will correspond to the variable name.
As you can see, the use of variables is a helpful feature in Selenium IDE. It proved very useful in my example above, but for test automation, each QA team should evaluate the need of variable according to each project.
