Selenium IDE with an XPath Locator

We are beginning to use the Selenium IDE at work to do some UI based testing. One thing that I wanted to test is the sorting of columns in a table. If you are like me, I like to test with the most simple implementation that I can.

While the assertTextPresent command is good to assert that a particular string is present, it does not assert the location of the string. Upon doing a little reading on the OpenQA site I found that the assertText command, along with an xpath target provides the ability to assert a string’s location.

The Selenium Core reference provided the insight. The documentation stated that the assertText method signature is: assertText ( locator, pattern ). The documentation goes on to explain, "Element Locators tell Selenium which HTML element a command refers to. The format of a locator is: locatorType = argument." Concerning the pattern input parameter, "Patterns are used for various reasons, e.g. to specify the expected value of an input field, or identify a select option.

Here is the HTML of a test page.

<html>

<body>

<table
id="firstTable" border="1">

<tr>

	<td>a1</td>

	<td>a2</td>

	<td>a3</td>

</tr>

<tr>

	<td>b1</td>

	<td>b2</td>

	<td>b3</td>

</tr>

<tr>

	<td>c1</td>

	<td>c2</td>

	<td>c3</td>

</tr>

</table>

</body>

</html>

I want to assert that the first cell is a1. I then want to assert that the cell below a1 is b1. Finally, I want to assert that the cell to the right of the a1 is a2.

I did this using the xpath locator for the first cell. xpath=//table[1]//tr[1]/td[1]. I could have also used xpath=//table[@id='firstTable']//tr[1]/td[1].

Here is the code of the Selenium IDE test:

<html>

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

<title>sel</title>

</head>

<body>

<table cellpadding="1"
cellspacing="1" border="1">

<thead>

<tr><td rowspan="1"
colspan="3">sel</td></tr>

</thead><tbody>

<tr>

	<td>open</td>

	<td>file:///home/mark/html/test.html</td>

	<td></td>

</tr>

<tr>

	<td>assertText</td>

	<td>xpath=//table[1]//tr[1]/td[1]</td>

	<td>a1</td>

</tr>

<tr>

	<td>assertText</td>

	<td>xpath=//table[1]//tr[2]/td[1]</td>

	<td>b1</td>

</tr>

<tr>

	<td>assertText</td>

	<td>xpath=//table[1]//tr[1]/td[2]</td>

	<td>a2</td>

</tr>



</tbody></table>

</body>

</html>

When running the test, here is the result:
Image of Selenium IDE test result.

Finally, since I was able to pass the test with the most simple implementation, now I will utilize the assertText assertion command to check the value of the first cell of a column before and after the sort action is called to verify that the sort worked as expected.