Echo, StoreEval and StoredVars

This post helps us understand how to declare, initialize and re-use variables in Selenium IDE.

store command

Helps in declaring and assigning a value to a variable.

ex:
Command: store
Target: 1000
Value: a

This will create a variable ‘a’ and assign 1000 as its value.

echo command

Helps in printing a value to the log. It can be a character, string, number or value of a variable.

To print value of a variable ,
Command: echo
Target: ${Variable Name}

ex:
command: echo
Target: ${a}

This will print value of variable ‘a’ that is 1000 to the log.

Note:
* If you simply give 'a' in the target instead of '${a}' then this is treated as a string/Character and 'a' is printed to log but not its value.

*All the variables declared in a test are stored into an array called "storedVars". In order to refer value of variable inside storedVars array, you can call Target: javascript{storedVars['a']}

*command: echo
Target: ${a}

is same as,

command: echo
Target: javascript{storedVars['a']}

*Command: echo
Target: storedVars['a']

this will print string "storedVars['a']" to the log but not value of ‘a’.

Assigning value of a Variable to another variable

Command: store
Target: ${a}
value: b

or,

Command: store
Target: javascript{storedVars['a']}
value: b

In both the examples mentioned above, value of 'a' is assigned to variable 'b'.

storeEval command

Using storeEval command you can directly assign or print value of a variables without help of 'javascript{}' in the target.

Ex:
Command: storeEval
Target: storedVars['a']
value: c

Observe that in the above example we are directly calling storedVars['a'] to assign value of variable ‘a’ to ‘c’.

How to add value 10 to variable ‘a’ and assigning it to variable ‘d’ ?

Command: storeEval
Target: storedVars['a']+10
value: d

Now if you try to print value of ‘d’ using echo command, then it will print string "1000+10" but not "1010". This is because the return value of storedVars['a'] in the target is being treated as a string. In order to avoid this, we need to type caste it to a number as follows,

Command: storeEval
Target: new Number(storedVars['a'])+10
Value: d

Now that we discussed all that mentioned above, create a test case to practice them (refer snapshot below)