Selenium RC in C# using NUnit: An End-to-End Example

This may come as a shock to many of you, but I’m kinda a dummy. (Collective gasps echoing through the Web.) I know! It’s hard to believe, but that’s why I’m such a great tester: I don’t take much for granted. I hate technology tutorials that kind of wing the details. The devil is in the details, YOU DUMMY! The common sense thing that you omitted might be the one thing that your reader is missing!

Because I love my readers and aspiring software testers, I’m going to give a dummy tutorial on how to get Selenium RC up and running for C#.NET users using NUnit. I’m going to cover every painful detail. I’m confident once you have this example running, you should be able to do a whole lot of things (assuming you have some basic coding skills).

First off, you need to get all these things (if you don’t have them):

• Selenium RC
• NUnit
• Firefox
• Selenium IDE
• Java Runtime Environment (You should already have this)

Selenium RC
-No installation necessary. Just find a permanent location and unzip it there. I unzipped mine at C:\ just to make things simple

NUnit, Firefox, and Java
-Just run the respective installs with all defaults selected.

Selenium IDE
-To install, right click on the file and select “Open With…”
-Select Firefox in the programs list. If it’s not in the immediate menu, browse to it. (default location should be “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe“
-When Firefox launches, click button in the dialog box that says “Install Now”.
-After the install of the plug-in, hit the “Restart Firefox” button when you see it.

Okay, so, now that you have the tools, we’re going to record a simple test in Selenium IDE. Even though we want to eventually run the test in Selenium RC, Selenium IDE is a great tool for getting the basic test recorded since it’s all UI point and click.

• Start up Firefox.
• Click on the “Tools” menu and click on “Selenium IDE”
• (Take your time to explore the Selenium IDE form)
• Notice that it’s already recording.  The red circle button on the right side is pressed in:
• Type “www.google.com” the main Firefox browser address bar and navigate to it.
• In the search box, type in “thetestingblog.com” and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
• Notice in your Selenium IDE window that steps are being recorded.
• With any luck, you hopefully landed on this blog’s home page.
• Highlight the text “Daniel Brown” on the page, right click.  You should select the option that says “VerifyTextPresent Daniel Brown”.  See below:

• Okay, we got our test recorded.  Now let’s run it to make sure it passes.
• Unclick the red circle button to turn off recording.
• Click on the green play triangle with the single bar to run the test

• All green, it passed.  Good.
• Now we want to convert this test to C#.
• Select “Options ->Format -> C# – Selenium RC” from the Selenium IDE window.

• Next select all the C# code and copy it.

• Open up Visual Studio
• Select “File ->New ->Project”
• In the New Project window under project types, select “Visual C# ->Windows”
• Select the “Class Library” Template and name it something like “TestingBlogSeleniumRc” and click “Ok”.
• It will create the project along with a file called “Class1.cs”.  Paste your SeleniumIDE test into that file.

1. Rename “Class1.cs” to “FirstTest.cs”.
2. In the code, change the namespace from “SeleniumTests” to “TestingBlogSeleniumRc”:
3. Modify the class name from “Untitled” to “FirstTest”.  It’s good to change this so that if you add other tests, there won’t be any duplicated class names in the namespace (This has gotten me before, causing compile errors.).
4. We also have to modify the Selenium instantiation to launch Internet Explorer.  Where it has “*chrome”, change it to “*iehta”.
5. Where it has “http://change-this-to-the-site-you-are-testing/”, change it to “http://www.google.com”.

• Next we need to add all the references so this thing will run.
• Go to the solution explorer, and right click on the “References” and select “Add Reference…”
• Hit the “Browse” tab and navigate to where you unzipped your SeleniumRC files.  Look in the dotnet client driver folder.  Here’s the path to mine:

C:\selenium-remote-control-1.0.1\selenium-dotnet-client-driver-1.0.1\

• Once you navigate to where the proper *.dlls are, select all of them and click “OK” to add them to the project.  (I know you can probably get away with adding less, but let’s keep it simple.)

• Build the project to see if it works.  (Mine worked.  Hopefully yours did too.)

• In order to run the Selenium RC test, you first have to have the Selenium RC server running.  The Selenium RC server folder should be in the files you unzipped.  Normally, I have a batch file on my desktop created to run the Selenium Server, but for our purposes, we’ll just run this from the “Start -> Run” commandline, using this command:

java -jar C:\selenium-remote-control-1.0.1\selenium-server-1.0.1\selenium-server.jar

• You should see some a dos window popup, and you will see something like the screenshot below.  DON”T CLOSE IT WHILE TESTING; IT NEEDS TO STAY RUNNING.  If you don’t have Java installed, this won’t work.  But most people should already have Java.

• Next you need to launch the NUnit GUI to run the test from.  Since you installed NUnit, you should be able to navigate to it “Start -> All Programs -> NUnit 2.4.7 -> NUnit GUI (.NET 2.0)”
• Once you open the NUnit runner, Click “File -> Open Project…” and navigate to the compiled dll from your test project.  For me, the path looks like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\dbrown1\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\TestingBlogSeleniumRc\TestingBlogSeleniumRc\bin\Debug\TestingBlogSeleniumRc.dll

• Once it loads, click on “Run” to start the test.

If you got all green, congrats!  You just got your first passing Selenium RC test!  From here we can definitely get more complex. I’m sorry if I was too verbose, but I didn’t want to leave out any important details.  If you have any specific issues, please post a question; I’ll be happy to answer it.  Thanks for reading!

UPDATE  10/14/2009:

Thank you for your comment, Ron.  You pointed out something that I completely spaced on.  There’s one more step you need to complete before your test is ready.  You must get rid of the try-catch exception block.  As long as you have that block in your test, your test will never fail.  Nunit counts on an exception being thrown when an assert statement fails.  If that exception gets caught, then Nunit thinks that the test passed.  Why does Selenium IDE put that try-catch in when coverting the test to C#?  I have no idea.  I just know that it doesn’t need to be in there in our example.

BEFORE Try-Catch is removed:

AFTER Try-Catch is removed:

Just because I want to prove that it works, I will show you an example where I have two tests in the file.  One looks for the text “Jello Pudding”, and one looks for the text “Daniel Brown”.  Here’s code for the tests:

(Helpful Note to Nunit beginners: when Nunit runs, it executes the [SetUp]  method before each [Test] and [TearDown] method after each [Test] .)   After running the two tests, I have very contrasting results (as I figured I would).  The test that looks for “Daniel Brown” passed like a charm, but the test for “Jelly Pudding” failed:

The bar is solid red because one failure at any level of the tree is a failed test run.  THANKS RON!  Sorry to leave out something so important.

Another order of business is I didn’t mention in my article, as granular as it is, that you need Visual Studio!  THANKS DAWN!  I guess I just kind of assumed that you might have it if you are interested in running Selenium in C#.  Well, I hate to assume so if you don’t have Visual Studio, you can download a free copy of Visual C# 2008 Express Edition: http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/ I believe you can run this example using the express edition, but I haven’t tested it.  If you do test it, give me some feedback.  I’d like to hear how it works.  Also, instead of the Visual C# Express Edition, you may also be able to use the Microsoft Visual Web Developer, but again I haven’t tested it.  I don’t know for sure.