Functionalities of Selenium

Question

I am learning Selenium Webdriver on my own, with a little bit of Java Programming background in my experience since the past three weeks.

In this time, I have learnt the following functionalities of Selenium by reading blogs/Practicing the codes which were found across google. 01. Element Locators 02. Mouse and Keyboard Events 03. Actions which can be performed on buttons, Dropdowns and ListViews. 04. Implicit and Explicit waits. 05. Uploading/Downloading files [With the AutoIT tool] 06. Data Driven testing. ie., Reading data from excel files and tables.

I just want a little more light to be shed as to are there any other functionalities of Selenium Webdriver which has to be learnt.

And one more thing am unsure about is- Can we use selenium to do stuff like database testing? Can we use it to retrieve data in database?

Because I have come across few posts which tells its not possible and there are some other posts which states it as possible.

Please shed a little knowledge on these things and help me out!! Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Selenium can be used to almost everything that you can do manually on a web application including:

1. Navigating through a web site/app.
2. Checking the site/app flow by performing actions such as clicking buttons, interacting with pop-ups, sending/receiving/storing data, uploading/downloading files.
3. Comparing images/graphs(Never done it myself. It's probably got more to with Java than Selenium)
4. Browser compatibility testing(FF is default. You have to download and pass the drivers for other browsers)
5. Parallel testing either by launching multiple classes simultaneously(more than one way to do this) or by using Selenium Grid.
6. Making your automated scripts a part of the Continuous Integration process.

Answer 2

No, you cannot use Selenium Webdriver to retrieve data from a database -- unless you were to access the data through a web browser. Selenium is a library for remote-controlling a web browser.

Answer 3

Selenium Webdriver by itself is just a tool that uses the browser as you tell it to (clicks, setTexts,waits for objects, etc...).

With Java (C#, Ruby, etc...) you can do all of that that you asked, it has nothing to do with webdriver itself.

Google something as "Access database using Java" or "Compare Files/images using Java" and you can find all the info you want with detailed tutorials.