RPT Custom Code - Ensuring Unique Logins for Looping Tests

A problem I have encountered while performance testing business applications with Rational Performance Tester is the uniqueness of logins. Often, business applications contain logic that will prevent duplicate logins from multiple sources at the same time, or will have workflow control or session replication or persistence that will result in interference if the same login is being used by more than one thread at the same time. A quick workaround to this problem can be to ensure there is a large pool of available logins to reduce the possibility of duplicates, however this is not always possible if a system is using Active Directory or LDAP, or if it SSO enabled. So the challenge being faced is, how do we bind a unique login to each virtual user thread in our test for the duration of the test?

The first approach would be to adjust the settings on your login datapool. When you add a datapool to your test an option exists to "Fetch only once per user".

In theory, this would be sufficient to ensure each thread will have a unique login. However in practice it seems to be not quite so simple. In a test configuration that uses multiple agents "Open mode" must be set to "Segmented" otherwise each agent will have a complete copy of the same list of accounts, resulting in duplication. In order to use Segmented in this manner though, your datapool must be larger than the number of threads in order to ensure sufficient rows are available in each segment. (IBM recommends you have 2x the number of records as threads to ensure balanced segmentation).

Despite the theory, I have run into the problem of threads exiting prematurely in a multiple user group/multiple agent/infinite loop test configuration with the error message "End of datapool reached". This is not an error we should be seeing. Reviewing the saved response data demonstrated that each thread was correctly using a single unique login, but somehow the error was consistent.

While attempting to debug the issue, I tried setting the "Wrap when last row is reached" property. Although successful in preventing threads from exiting prematurely, the wrap property appears to override the fetch-once property, returning me to a state of duplicate logins. Unfortunately, IBM's documentation does a poor job of explaining how each of these datapool properties interact with one another, so in order to overcome this issue I turned to writing my own piece of custom code to manage my logins.

The following custom code solution binds threads to a specific login on first access, and thereafter will always return the same login identifier for each subsequent request. It also segments the login map into groups that can be manually accessed (by passing the group name as the first parameter) or automatically by setting the User Group Name in your schedule.

This code is simplified and has a few limitations.

1. Distinct Agent Segments - Each Agent must use a distinct User Group Name because static objects are not shared in memory between agents. If two agents are assigned to the same User Group then duplicate logins will occur.
2. Configurability - The segments and login lists are hardcoded in this code segment, this could be overcome by adding an option to read logins from a file (or other data storage)
3. Order - Logins will always be returned in the same order for each subsequent test run, a piece of randomization code would allow them to be shuffled.

package export; 

import java.util.Arrays; 
import java.util.HashMap; 
import java.util.List; 
import java.util.Map; 

import com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.IDataArea; 
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.IVirtualUserInfo; 
import com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.services.RPTCondition; 

/** 
 * !!Warning!!: This code is NOT agent safe. Each unique set of segmentation identifiers MUST be isolated to a single agent for this code to work correctly 
 * @author grempel 
 */ 
public class UniqueLoginManager implements 
                com.ibm.rational.test.lt.kernel.custom.ICustomCode2 { 
        
        private static Map<String, List<String>> loginsBySegment = new HashMap<String, List<String>>(); 
        private static Map<String, String> loginsByThread = new HashMap<String, String>(); 
        private static Map<String, Integer> indexBySegment = new HashMap<String, Integer>(); 
        private static boolean initialized = false; 

        /** 
         * Initializes static login maps by segmentation 
         */ 
        private synchronized void init() { 
                if(!initialized) { 
                        loginsBySegment.put("GRP1", Arrays.asList(new String[]{"grp1_login1","grp1_login2","grp1_login3"...}));
                        loginsBySegment.put("GRP2", Arrays.asList(new String[]{"grp2_login1","grp2_login2","grp2_login3"...}));
                        loginsBySegment.put("GRP3", Arrays.asList(new String[]{"grp3_login1","grp3_login2","grp3_login3"...}));
                        indexBySegment.put("GRP1", 0); 
                        indexBySegment.put("GRP2", 0); 
                        indexBySegment.put("GRP3", 0); 
                        initialized = true; 
                } 
        } 
        
        /** 
         * Instances of this will be created using the no-arg constructor. 
         */ 
        public UniqueLoginManager() { 
        } 
        
        /** 
         * Returns the previous login if the thread has previously requested a login during this test execution. Otherwise retrieves the next login from the list, binds it to the thread, and returns it. 
         * @param segmentId 
         * @param thread 
         * @return String.class login 
         */ 
        public synchronized String getLogin(String segmentId, String thread) { 
                if(loginsByThread.containsKey(thread)) { 
                        return loginsByThread.get(thread); 
                } else { 
                        init(); 
                        List<String> logins = loginsBySegment.get(segmentId); 
                        Integer index = indexBySegment.get(segmentId); 
                        if(logins!=null && logins.size()>0 && index<logins.size()) { 
                                String login = logins.get(index); 
                                indexBySegment.put(segmentId, index+1); 
                                loginsByThread.put(thread, login); 
                                return login; 
                        } else { 
                                //fail 
                                return null; 
                        } 
                } 
        } 

        /** 
         * Generate and manage unique logins across multiple user threads and user-defined segments. 
         * Warning: This class is not thread-safe for a segmentation identifier that is distributed across multiple agents. Each segmentation identifier 
         * must exist on a single agent to avoid login duplication. 
         * @param String.class[] args - arg0 = segmentation identifier (optional, if not included will use the UserGroupName as segmentation identifier) 
         */ 
        public String exec(ITestExecutionServices tes, String[] args) { 
                String segmentId = null; 
                ITestLogManager tlm = tes.getTestLogManager(); 
                
                IDataArea dataArea = tes.findDataArea(IDataArea.VIRTUALUSER); 
                IVirtualUserInfo virtualUserInfo = (IVirtualUserInfo)dataArea.get(IVirtualUserInfo.KEY); 
                String user = virtualUserInfo.getUserName(); 
                
                //If arg[0] not provided, use the UserGroupName as the segmentation identifier 
                if(args.length<1) { 
                        segmentId = virtualUserInfo.getUserGroupName(); 
                } else { 
                        segmentId = args[0]; 
                } 
                
                String login = getLogin(segmentId, user); 
                if(login==null) { 
                        tlm.reportErrorCondition(RPTCondition.CustomCodeAlert); 
                        return null; 
                } 
                
                return login; 
        } 
}