Red Gate ANTS script tester
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Contents |
Introduction
ANTS Load allows you to 'script' the actions inside a web browser and replay them to simulate hundreds or thousands of clients that will be accessing a website. The process of creating the script involves setting up a proxy, instructing an instance of the Internet Explorer web browser to use that proxy, and recording all of your navigations as they go through.
These scripts are a good starting point, but more often than not, they will need to be modified to handle dynamic page elements or just to log some information to a text file. Also, the script may behave differently when run by the ANTS Load software because Internet Explorer handles a lot of actions automatically whereas the ANTS scripts must be programmed to handle these actions. Redirection and authentication are two examples. A change in the website between development and testing can also cause problems that will show themselves in the test script, for instance if the script was created against a website that did not have event validation enabled and then the script was run against a server where event validation is required, resulting in an error in the testing environment.
How script tester can help
Most likely if you encounter one of these problems, they won't show themselves until the end of a long and stressful test run. Imagine running a four-hour load test and finding out you'd made a really silly syntax error in your script! The ANTS Load script tester is designed to help you avoid this problem. After creating a project in ANTS Load, you can load the project into the script tester to
- Check for syntax errors in the script
- Run through the script and check for invalid URLs
- Step through each request in the script and see the results of the request in a browser window.
It may also be useful to use script tester in conjunction with ANTS Profiler to test ASP .NET web applications. For instance, you could record a test script in ANTS Load, then start ANTS Profiler to profile the website's code, and replay the same scenarios in the script tester after you've made code changes to see if your changes made an impact on the web application performance.
What's supported
The script tester supports state information, HttpResponse objects (if you reference WebClient.HttpResponse in the script, there will be a fully-populated response object ready for use), GET and POST requests, and automatic ViewState and EventValidation handling. It also supports webservice tests since version 1.3. It is not ideal as it does not display results of web methods in the browser, but it will run web methods and access properties that appear in the script. The webservice tests will still point out any errors if there are any, and also allow you to test scripts that mix websites and webservices.
There are also a few script methods and properties that have not been implemented. These will generate an error message during the script compilation. If any of these errors appear, please notify the author!
Download
Install
Extract to your local hard disk on the computer where ANTS Load is installed. The script tester will need the Visual Studio scripting environment from ANTS Load to be able to read the ANTS project files. To launch, run ANTSScriptTest.exe. Sorry, there is no installer!
Support
Please direct any questions to the support forum:
