Selenium IDE Scheduler Has Arrived – Part 1

It is finally here! I am about to commit all the code for the scheduler and release v2.9.0 of Selenium IDE and it will be awesome contain it very own scheduler. (It is awesome, but you decide that). What exactly is the scheduler? It is a feature that I have worked on for more than a year. Most of the time testing that it works as expected after a new Firefox release. Sigh. Anyway that does not explain what the scheduler does. The Selenium IDE Scheduler allows you to specify test suites to be run at specific times and it will run those tests at the specified times. All within the Selenium IDE and all without requiring any further interaction with you. It is as simple as set, turn on and forget!

You can forget about it, at least until the browser crashes. So how long is that going to be exactly? I have not been able to track that down precisely. It kind of depends on the Firefox version, the size of your web application pages and the size of your test suites and the number of test suites scheduled. I think you get the idea. If you have a web app where every page is a couple of megabytes, it will be a few days. Under some set of web apps and test suites, I have never seen it go down for a couple of months. I have the feeling that Selenium IDE was never designed to do these kind of things. Then again, where is the fun in not pushing the limits!

When you start Selenium IDE v2.9, you will immediately see the new Scheduler button on the Selenium IDE toolbar just before the record button on the right.

If you look carefully at the button, it kind of looks like a clock. On some platforms, *cough* Windows *cough* it looks like it has been given the Salvadore Dalí treatment. I would like to assure you that Dalí had nothing to do with this, it is merely an artefact of my poor design skills. As to why it is pointing at 4 0’clock, your theory is probably more fun to hear.

If you look carefully at the button, you can also find a drop down menu chevron which gives you access to two menu items. A Play test suites periodically menu item and a Toggle Scheduler menu item.

The Play test suites periodically menu item will open a scheduler dialog box where you can set up the test suites to be run and the times at which they should be run. Using the scheduler dialog box you can also maintain your automatically run test suites by removing them or changing the times at which they are run. You can also turn the scheduler on and off and view messages from the scheduler. The Toggle Scheduler menu item is a shortcut to turn the scheduler on or off without opening the scheduler dialog box. Clicking on the clock icon on the toolbar will also turn the scheduler on or off. You also have a new menu item Schedule tests to run periodically in the Options menu of Selenium IDE which will open the scheduler dialog box.

The Selenium IDE Scheduler works with jobs. A job contains information about what the scheduler should do. It contains a title, it contains the test suite that should be automatically run or played and it contains the schedule information, which is the time when the test suite should be run. Here is a quick look at the scheduler dialog box where you can edit a job.

That’s it for now. In part 2, I will show you how to set up the jobs and how to maintain them.