Assertion or Verification?

Assertion or Verification?

Choosing between “assert” and “verify” comes down to convenience and management of failures. There’s very little point checking that the first paragraph on the page is the correct one if your test has already failed when checking that the browser is displaying the expected page. If you’re not on the correct page, you’ll probably want to abort your test case so that you can investigate the cause and fix the issue(s) promptly. On the other hand, you may want to check many attributes of a page without aborting the test case on the first failure as this will allow you to review all failures on the page and take the appropriate action. Effectively an “assert” will fail the test and abort the current test case, whereas a “verify” will fail the test and continue to run the test case.
The best use of this feature is to logically group your test commands, and start each group with an “assert” followed by one or more “verify” test commands. An example follows:

Command	Target	Value
open	/download/
assertTitle	Downloads
verifyText	//h2	Downloads
assertTable	1.2.1	Selenium IDE
verifyTable	1.2.2	June 3, 2008
verifyTable	1.2.3	1.0 beta 2

The above example first opens a page and then “asserts” that the correct page is loaded by comparing the title with the expected value. Only if this passes will the following command run and “verify” that the text is present in the expected location. The test case then “asserts” the first column in the second row of the first table contains the expected value, and only if this passed will the remaining cells in that row be “verified”.

verifyTextPresent

The command verifyTextPresent is used to verify specific text exists somewhere on the page. It takes a single argument–the text pattern to be verified. For example:

Command	Target	Value
verifyTextPresent	Marketing Analysis

This would cause Selenium to search for, and verify, that the text string “Marketing Analysis” appears somewhere on the page currently being tested. Use verifyTextPresent when you are interested in only the text itself being present on the page. Do not use this when you also need to test where the text occurs on the page.

verifyElementPresent

Use this command when you must test for the presence of a specific UI element, rather than its content. This verification does not check the text, only the HTML tag. One common use is to check for the presence of an image.

Command	Target	Value
verifyElementPresent	//div/p/img

This command verifies that an image, specified by the existence of an <img> HTML tag, is present on the page, and that it follows a <div> tag and a <p> tag. The first (and only) parameter is a locator for telling the Selenese command how to find the element. Locators are explained in the next section.
verifyElementPresent can be used to check the existence of any HTML tag within the page. You can check the existence of links, paragraphs, divisions <div>, etc. Here are a few more examples.

Command	Target	Value
verifyElementPresent	//div/p
verifyElementPresent	//div/a
verifyElementPresent	id=Login
verifyElementPresent	link=Go to Marketing Research
verifyElementPresent	//a[2]
verifyElementPresent	//head/title

These examples illustrate the variety of ways a UI element may be tested. Again, locators are explained in the next section.

verifyText

Use verifyText when both the text and its UI element must be tested. verifyText must use a locator. If you choose an XPath or DOM locator, you can verify that specific text appears at a specific location on the page relative to other UI components on the page.

Command	Target	Value
verifyText	//table/tr/td/div/p	This is my text and it occurs right after the div inside the table.

Locating Elements