Ed Glas's blog on VSTS load testing : Extraction Rules

Event ordering in Web Tests

edglas — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:49:49 GMT

Web tests have a number of extensibility points before and after a request. What order do they run in?

The hooks are:

WebTestPlugin.PreRequest

WebTestRequestPlugin.PreRequest

ExtractionRule.Extract

ValidationRule.Validate

Here is a sequence diagram that shows what order things fire:

There is no guaranteed order of firing for WebTestPlugin.PreRequest and RequestPlugin.PreRequest. Also if you have >1 Extraction or Validation rule on a request there is no guaranteed order they are run in.

Also note that Pre and Post request events do not fire by default for dependents. You can hook the PostRequest call on a top level request and iterate through dependents to wire up event handlers if you need that functionality.

Ed.

New templates for plugins and rules

edglas — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:30:35 GMT

Inspired by templates developed by Dennis Bass of the services test labs, I added new item templates to the codeplex.com\TeamTestPlugins project.

If you install these on your machine it makes creating new plugins much easier:

If you work with web and load tests you'll find these very handy, and they are xcopy-installed on your machine (you'll have them working in less than 5 minutes).

Now to get these in our next release. :)

Ed.

InfoPath WebTests on CodePlex!

edglas — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:58:00 GMT

The InfoPath team has written a set of WebTest plugins that enable testing InfoPath with a WebTest.

See the project on codeplex here: http://www.codeplex.com/ipfswebtest

The project contains custom extraction rules, a sample web test, and a doc on how to use them.

These tests are difficult to script from scratch, so it is great to see this project with the necessary extraction rules already coded and docs on how to use them.

Many thanks to the support of the InfoPath test team on this, especially John Booze and Mary Smith.

Ed.