Must-Have Selenium IDE Addons & Extentions

Selenium IDE is a great tool for automating within a tight budget, but it has one major weakness -- the logical flow of the script cannot be controlled.  Because of this, we were seriously considering moving all of our scripts to the Selenium Remote Control.

Thankfully though, I did some research and found some lifesaving addons and extensions.



Starting with the least helpful down to the most helpful:

1. File Logging -- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/177844/
   This addon allows you to save the Selenium Logs to a file.  It automatically can capture and write to a file any one of the four logs: Debug, Info, Warn, Error.  I have it installed, but haven't used it extensively yet.
2. Log Search Bar -- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/210844/
   This addon adds a search bar at the bottom of the Selenium IDE.  This is helpful for searching through the logs (and when the TestSuites are huge, this is helpful).  On the downside, it takes up some space, but it can easily be disabled and re-enabled, so no big issue.
3. Suppress Security Warning -- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/126519/
   This is extremely helpful in cases where the browser is throwing security warnings during tests, causing the script to stall or fail.  Obviously, this isn't good to have installed when you are manually testing, so it's good to have multiple FF profiles set up (I will explain how to do this easily in another blog post).
   
4. Remember Certificate Exception -- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10246/
   This is just as helpful as the previous one, especially when testing on QA servers where the security certificates have not been installed properly, where they have not been updated, or when using a branch environment where they haven't even been set up (which happens more often than not in fast paced development environments where projects are being coded and tested in parallel).
   
5. Stored Variables Viewer -- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/189780/
   This addon keeps track of all of the stored variables which you have in the current test session.  If you are wondering what the value of a variable is, you no longer have to manually add an "echo" command after the variable change -- you can directly view the value by clicking on the Stored-Vars tab.
6. Flow Control Extension -- https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dm6sk55_37fmpg8tcr
   This is hands down the best extension for Selenium that I've come across.  It adds logical flow commands to the IDE: label, goto, gotoIf, gotoLabel, while, and endWhile.  I learned about it and installed it from the instructions found on 51 Elliot's blog.  Because he has instructions for the installation there, I'll not get into all of that -- I'll just post up some useful examples to show how powerful this extension is.

#5 and #6 are definite Must-Haves for anyone using Selenium IDE.