A major challenge that I encounter consistently as a Performance Engineer is priming a system with known, consistent data that I can feed into datapools and use for testing. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this: conversion processes, generation tools, database scripts, restore/upgrade processes, etc. However, a project that I have been working on recently has a variety of issues with these strategies. The database is automatically generated and nearly impossible to decipher, not to mention that it changes with each new code release. The second issue is that the data generation tools are not being kept up to date by the developers, so they are usually broken with each new release. These issues have led me to the point of using my performance testing tool (Rational Performance Tester v8.5.2) as a workaround data priming tool.
This plan has its own challenges, primary identifiers are all system generated - and the only way I can reliably access the data once it is generated is using those primary identifiers. Granted, there are ways to obtain this information once it exists in the system, but they involved days if not weeks of effort to extract and cleanse the data into a form that can be used effectively, and would require significant assistance from a developer to do so. A better way would be to process and extract the desired information from the responses themselves as it is being generated by RPT.
Currently RPT does not have any simple write-back mechanism for references during a test. There may exist a way using references and variables - but if it does it is well hidden beneath the primary strengths of the tool, which are load generation, data substitution, and response analysis. This led me to consider the question "How would I enhance the tool to let me extract response data?". Since RPT is an Eclipse-based tool and supports the addition of custom code and plug-ins it should be entirely feasible to write some code to extract whatever I wanted from it.
So that is what I did - the example and the code presented below is a very simple, bare-bones way of extracting a reference from a page response, passing it into a block of custom code, and writing it to a CSV file in a thread-safe manner that will allow you to import the generated CSV back into your project as a datapool source. There are dozens of ways I can think of to use this code and enhance it if you want to write to a database, do data transformation, correlating reference data with existing datapools, or producing multiple outputs - but this should be sufficient to get you started if you are encountering problems bridging that gap from theoretical to practical.
Step 1: Create a Custom Code Class
With your recorded test open, right-click your top-level test element and select "Add --> Custom Code".
Selecting the new Custom code element will show the Custom Code element details in the right-side pane that lets you enter a Class name (in the format: "package.Class"). If this is the first time you have created a Custom Code class - click the "Generate Code" button to create a basic default class implementation. If you already have the Custom Code class you want to use, skip down to Step 4 for adding an existing Custom Code element to your test case.
This will generate a simple Custom Code class that you can start using in your test.
package export;
import com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.services.ITestExecutionServices;
/**
* @author unknown
*/
public class Test implements
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.custom.ICustomCode2 {
/**
* Instances of this will be created using the no-arg constructor.
*/
public Test() {
}
/**
* For javadoc of ICustomCode2 and ITestExecutionServices interfaces, select 'Help Contents' in the
* Help menu and select 'Extending Rational Performance Tester functionality' -> 'Extending test execution with custom code'
*/
public String exec(ITestExecutionServices tes, String[] args) {
return null;
}
}
To organize my library of custom code, I created a new Performance Test Project called "CustomCodeReference". If you create this project as a Performance Test Project it will automatically include all of the required RPT libraries in its build path. This will also allow me to export the project into a .jar file that I can import into other projects, or simply reuse it as a dependency in other Performance Testing projects as needed.
Step 2: Create a Singleton File Writer
Create a new class file that will be used by our custom code as the singleton file writer to manage file creation, access, and synchronization between threads. In this example I have created the class "export.ExportAdministrator" in my CustomCodeReference project to be my singleton file writer class. A suggested enhancement to this structure would be to create a dedicated Factory class that returns an instance of an interface to allow for multiple optional implementations such as a CSV file implementation, an XML file implementation, or a database implementation.
package export;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
/**
* @author grempel
* @date 2014-03-27
*
* Singleton class with factory to manage thread-safe file export
* Usage:
* Call ExportAdministrator.getInstance() to obtain object reference
* Use instance write() or writeln() to export to file
*/
public class ExportAdministrator {
private static ExportAdministrator instance = null;
private FileWriter fw = null;
public ExportAdministrator() {
//Build string writer
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH-mm-ss");
File file = new File("C:\\rpt-log\\" + df.format(System.currentTimeMillis()) + " output.csv");
try {
fw = new FileWriter(file);
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
/**
* Retrieve singleton instance of writer.
*/
public static synchronized ExportAdministrator getInstance() {
if(instance==null) {
instance = new ExportAdministrator();
}
return instance;
}
/**
* Write string to file
*/
public synchronized String write(String str) {
if(fw!=null) {
try {
fw.write(str);
fw.flush();
return "true";
} catch (Exception e) {
return e.toString();
}
}
return "failed";
}
/**
* Write string to file and start a new line
*/
public synchronized String writeln(String str) {
if(fw!=null) {
try {
fw.write(str);
fw.write("\r\n");
fw.flush();
return "true";
} catch (Exception e) {
return e.toString();
}
}
return "failed";
}
/**
* Clean up open file references
*/
@Override
protected void finalize() throws Throwable {
if(fw!=null) {
fw.close();
}
super.finalize();
}
}
This class will generate a timestamped output file in the folder "C:\rpt-log\" on each agent that is running the test.
One note to make about the usage of this class. If you are using more than 1 virtual user to generate your data, you are best to compile the entire set of data you want to write to the file into 1 string before calling writeln(). If you attempt to call write() multiple times, you cannot guarantee that they will be sequential as another thread may have called the write() method in the meantime.
Step 3: Call File Writer from Custom Code
With our file writer (ExportAdministrator) singleton in place, we can now modify our custom code to submit whatever we want to write to that file. In this case I have created our Custom Code class called "export.ExportIdentifier" in my CustomCodeReference project.
This custom code expects 2 arguments to be passed to it, an output type: a simple text string that will allow you to group outputs based on the type of data being written - this allows you to reuse the code for multiple types of values in a single test; and an output value: the value you want to write. In addition to these, this custom code will also generate a timestamp that will be written to the file in order to determine the write operation sequence.
package export;
import com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.services.ITestExecutionServices;
import com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.services.ITestLogManager;
import com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.services.RPTCondition;
/**
* @author grempel
* @date 2014-03-27
*
* Usage:
* Add Custom Code reference to a test
* Set Class name = /CustomCodeReference/export.ExportIdentifier
* Add Arguments
* - Text: Value Type String
* - Text or Reference: Value String
*/
public class ExportIdentifier implements
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.custom.ICustomCode2 {
/**
* Instances of this will be created using the no-arg constructor.
*/
public ExportIdentifier() {
}
/**
* For javadoc of ICustomCode2 and ITestExecutionServices interfaces, select 'Help Contents' in the
* Help menu and select 'Extending Rational Performance Tester functionality' -> 'Extending test execution with custom code'
* @param String.class[] args - arg0 = value type, arg1 = value to write
*/
public String exec(ITestExecutionServices tes, String[] args) {
//Validate arguments
String type = null;
String value = null;
ITestLogManager tlm = tes.getTestLogManager();
if(args.length<=1) {
tlm.reportErrorCondition(RPTCondition.CustomCodeAlert);
return null;
}
type = args[0];
value = args[1];
Long timestamp = System.currentTimeMillis();
//Generate CSV string to write to file
String result = timestamp.toString() + "," + type + "," + value;
//Submit string to writer
String error = ExportAdministrator.getInstance().writeln(result);
//Catch errors and return to RPT for validation and handling
if(error.equalsIgnoreCase("true")) {
return result;
}
return error;
}
}
To use this custom code in your test, add a Custom Code element to your test (see Step 1 for reference). Instead of generating a new class, we will be specifying our existing class in the Class Name field with the format: "/ProjectName/package.ClassName". In the above example this will be "/CustomCodeReference/export.ExportIdentifier".
Next we will add the arguments to the custom code element details. The first argument is the output type. Click the "Text" button on the right and specify the text to submit as the type. This can be different for each Custom Code element that you add to your test, but it works best as a hard-coded value in order to ensure it remains the same for each iteration.
Then click "Add" and select a data source object or reference to use as the output value. In this example I have set the output type to "TestAccountName" and the output value to the "Username" variable from my datapool. This example is redundant, I already have my usernames in a datapool - normally I would insert the custom code after a page response that contains some data that I want to write to a file, and select a reference instead.
This will now allow me to export any generated data that exists in the response record to an external source.
