What is Selenium Inspector?

Selenium Inspector is an add-on on top of Selenium for simplifying automated testing of Web components, pages and applications, especially those written using JSF.

Selenium Inspector provides an API similar to that of Selenium in many respects, but is simpler to use in many cases and provides a bit higher level of abstraction. It doesn’t replace Selenium, but provides an additional API that you can use if you find it more appropriate for your actual needs. You can use both Selenium and Selenium Inspector APIs at the same time. Selenium’s API is concentrated in the com.thoughtworks.selenium.Selenium class, which provides a list of methods for sending commands to a browser (and receiving a result if needed), and the entire variety of commands is combined in a single list regardless of their very different purposes and applicability. Selenium Inspector provides a higher-level API with object-oriented design that is centered around inspection of a single element, and provides different APIs depending on type of element. As a result there are the following advantages:

* Easier to perform several inspections/operations over a single element as is often required in functional testing.
* Easy to access child nodes and a parent node when needed.
* It’s easier to inspect/operate on complex HTML tags, such as <table>, <ul>, etc. because of the specialized higher-level API.
* It becomes possible to inspect not just primitive elements, but the whole components. This allows testing components without depending on details of their implementation. It’s possible to create APIs for any other libraries/abstractions.
* There are additional higher-level utilities, such as easy style inspection.
* There’s a lot of assertion methods that are commonly needed in functional testing, etc.

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