Reduce the complexity of string formatting

    Performance testing requires more advanced skills than many other testing areas, for example, functional testing.   String formatting is an essential part of the performance testing skill set.  Many beginners think of it as a headache thanks to some examples they saw where testers have to use APIs to move data back and forth between per-instance parameters and  variables in code. As a consequence, even something as simple as “A = B + C” is not simple any more.    

  

   As this blog shows,  many cases the complexity is due to the design of the test platform. With a properly designed test platform, the programming complexity can be abstracted away from the tester and hence scripting can be so simple and clean that it is a pleasure.

    There is a Q&A thread on stackoverflow about adding multiple values to a parameter.  Basically the tester needs to send an HTTP POST with data in the following format, where the numbers are dynamically extracted from previous HTTP response.

 articleIds=["148437", "148720"]  

    This request seems innocent enough, but in fact is not that easy to implement. The author of the question,  who has a good programming background based on his stackoverflow reputation points, must have struggled with it before asking the question in the forum.  The answer comes from a JMeter guru who had answered hundreds if not thousands of questions.  My hat comes off to him!    The code snippet is given here not to ask readers of this blog to understand it, but rather to appreciate its complexity.

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.append("[");
int count = Integer.parseInt(vars.get("articleID_matchNr"));
for (int i = 1; i <= count; i++) {
    sb.append("\"");
    sb.append(vars.get("articleID_" + i));
    if (i < count) {
        sb.append("\", ");
    }
}
sb.append("\"]");
sampler.addArgument("articleIds", sb.toString());

     The above solution works well,  but it can be hard to program, especially for testers who have not  been doing a lot of programming.    Fortunately, the solution on NetGend is so simple that every test scripter can learn it in a minute.

     To give a more precise context to the test scenario, let us assume the server sends a response like the following, we need to send a HTTP request as required by the author.

....
<preference>148437</preference><preference>148720</preference>
....

     The script on NetGend is quite simple.  The three bold lines in the following basically do what's in the complex code above. The code around the bold lines are there to show how easy it is to make it into a more complete implementation.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

function VUSER () {     action(http, "http://www.example.com/viewUsers");     ids = substring(http.replyBody, "<preference>", "</preference>", "all");     ids = toJson(ids);     b.articleIds = ids;     http.POSTData = combineHttpParam(b);     action(http,"http://www.example.com/viewIDs"); }

• Line 2:  perform a HTTP transaction, the HTTP response will be in the variable "http.replyBody".
• Line 3:  extract the value by specifying a left boundary and right boundary and put the result, an array,  in the variable "ids"
• Line 4:  convert the variable ids who holds the array into a JSON string, in this case, the JSON string should look like  ["148437", "148720"]
• Line 5:  create a dictionary variable b,  which has a field called "articleIds" and the value of the field is the JSON string "ids"
• Line 6:  call the function "combineHttpParam" on the dictionary b to create the desired HTTP Post data:   articleIds=["148437", "148720"]. This function will turn a dictionary variable into HTTP parameters like key1=value1&key2=value2 ...
• Line 7:  do a HTTP transaction with the HTTP POST data.

    As you can see, the complexity of string manipulation (think of the code around StringBuilder in Java) is abstracted from the functions toJson and combinteHttpParam.

   At NetGend, we are driven by a desire to make things as simple and intuitive as possible. We are proud that our platform has the right architecture and technology to actually do it.  If you are interested in learning more, please drop us a line:  info@netgend.com.