Selenium IDE: the way to test the locators

Selenium IDE is quite restricted solution and it's not recommended to use it as a solution for full scale test automation. But there're some areas where it helps a lot. Of course it can record sample tests and convert it into the code. That's the main Selenium IDE feature. But not the only one. Selenium IDE is very helpful when we want to test our locators and make sure they point to proper element. In this post I'll try to make step by step instructions how to do that.

Intro: Our own test automation tool

All the time I have to deal with some test automation tool. And all the time I have to live with the difficulties of each tool. If we have some huge vendor tool it's definitely something VBScript/JScript-based with all related restrictions. Or at least there're restrictions of programming language. It's critical because various wizards are not enough to make robust and reliable tests. Sometimes I have to make quite precise tuning to make my solution working the way I need. And even more, such wizards also consume memory and make overall work slower.