current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

Stack Exchange
tour help
careers 2.0
Take the 2-minute tour ×
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 1 down vote favorite
2

I want to export recorded Selenium 2 WebDriver Tests with the IDE or the Builder as C# code to use it in my MSTest project.

Until now I have to rewrite the code from NUnit code to MSTest, but I want to write a plugin / rewrite export code.

Now I am asking you if you've got experience with the differences for this issue between Selenium IDE and Selenium Builder, focusing on the following aspects:

  1. Usability
  2. Bugs
  3. Quality of exported code
  4. Extensibility (Rewriting exported code and also program features)

What I can tell you until now is:

  1. IDE is way better to control. Builder seems to be easier but is pretty unhandy.
  2. Selenium Builder has more Bugs.
  3. IDE code is better, Builder doesn't handle NUnit lifecycle methods that good (Setup and Teardown Class and Test is missing)
  4. Haven't tried this until now.

Update

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/selenium-developers/8_GULPxxxGs

"Selenium IDE is going to the end of support soon, being superseded by Selenium Builder." [...] "I expect a transition period of a least two years"

Found this right now.

share|improve this question

1 Answer 1

up vote 0 down vote

The following words are my opinion and I don't want to hurt someone's feelings but Selenium IDE (or Builder) should be mostly used as a 'helper' in your testing activities. To rely for code or execution on such (capture-replay) tool is not serious. Why!? First it's poor maintainability and repeating code. Next is a need of some additional language (JS) support for even most simple operations.

If you think twice - you'll see that WebDriver or Selenium 2.0 is way better solution. Yes- you can export code, but like you said the result is not very good. I agree that you can reuse this auto-generated code, but again you'll have to implement additional logic by yourself in order to replace/extend some snippets. And this so called help will require additional time to be 'civilized' with your Framework solution. On the other hand if you already have good Framework support - it's architecture will take care of this (base classes, Singleton, tests-case 'skeletons' etc.)

In my practice I've used IDE in some very tricky cases when I needed to be sure that the Selenium finds the particular web-element indeed. One key advantage I found about Builder is the multi-browser support.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.