Selenium (not the Element)

Today's topic is selenium.   Selenium is this pretty nifty tool that helps for GUI "unit testing".  What it does is records all of your actions and then will play it back for you.  It's perfect when you make changes to the UI under the hood and want to make sure stuff works right.  So basically, it is a unit test of your UI.

I've already confirmed that it does work with the group projects (at least with my group's project).  So you can totally use it to help automate filling in forms over and over by a simple click of the mouse.

Selenium is basically another class to use in python.  (It also runs with Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript and many more natively).  So you can just make a new instance of a window and tell it to start clicking on things and filling in forms.  

But there is the best way, go get the Selenium IDE from seleniumhq.org/download.  The IDE is  firefox plugin.  Go ahead and install it.  Then go under tools and select it.  There will be a path name on the front, paste the google app engine link into it.   Click the red button off to the right and start filling in forms and navigating through pages and clicking on stuff.  When you are done, hit that red button again and then hit the play button.   It will start to play back exactly (or nearly exactly, Selenium is sometimes wonky when recording things but you can easily insert some commands to fix it) what you did.  Play with it for a while and see what happens.  You might like it or you might hate it.  Either way, I don't really care.

Any way there is a convert script to python tab menu thing and it will do that and generate a python script where you can add system calls and other functions you write (such as creating a table) and then run it as the Selenium script starts running.  Next time, I will go more in depth about this to give you time to play with Selenium because the next part is a pain to get to work and requires you to know how to do Selenium well.