Create Selenium scripts for SAP Cloud ALM Synthetic User Monitoring

[Richard_Büffing]

Introduction

With Synthetic User Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM you can simulate actions, like mouse clicks or entered text, of a user in a web based application.
Selenium Scripts are an important prerequisite for SAP Cloud ALM Synthetic User Monitoring.
In this article I will show you, how to install the required Selenium IDE and how to record a Selenium script.

Installing Selenium IDE

In order to record Selenium scripts you must first install the Selenium IDE.
It is a browser based authoring environment that can be installed from the extensions store of your browser.

Installation in Google Chrome

Go to the upper right corner and open the menu point for managing extensions.

From the lefthand side go to the chrome extensions web store:

In the search field enter "Selenium IDE" and hit enter.

Click on the Selenium IDE search result:

Now click on "Add to Chrome":

Confirm the popup by clicking on "Add extension"

Installation in Microsoft Edge

Go to the upper right corner and open the menu point for managing extensions.
Then click on "Get extensions for Microsoft Edge"

In the search field enter "Selenium IDE" and press enter.
Then from the result list click on "Get" next to the Selenium extension:

Confirm the popup by clicking on "Add extension"

Creating a Project and Recording a Script

In order to record you actions you must first create a Selenium project.
Start the Selenium IDE by opening the browser extension you just installed from the upper right area of your browser.

You are now greeted with the start page of the Selenium IDE.
From there you can do different things.
For the sake of simplicity we are going with the first option "Record a new test in a new project".

Give your new project a name and klick on OK:

Enter the base URL of the application that you would like to test/monitor.
In this example we will use the Google search page, but it could be any web application that is reachable from your browser.
Once you entered the URL click on "Start Recording"

Now the start window of your application is opening and you can see at the lower right area that Selenium is recording your actions:

You can now go ahead and perform any number of clicks with your mouse or entering text.
In this example I entered text in the seach field and hit enter. Then I clicked on the first search result.

Once you are done, bring up the Selenium IDE window by clicking on the icon in the taskbar.

From the open Selenium window click on the "Stop recording" icon in the upper right corner.

You can now see the list of actions that have been recorded.
From here you can edit/modify them if needed or replay steps and also the whole script to see if it's working.
From this window you can also add further test scripts with different base URLs and record other actions.

Once you are done editing or testing you can save the project by clicking on the save icon in the upper right corner.

By default the project name is taken as the name for the file, but you can change it to whatever you like.
Just make sure you have the extension .side.

Conclusion

We have installed the Selenium IDE browser extension and we have recorded a Selenium test script.
This script will be used later on for uploading into SAP Cloud ALM.
SAP Cloud ALM will make use of this script in the context of Synthetic User Monitoring and let it run on a recular automated basis on so called runners. These runners are robots that will automatically execute the script.