HP Ajax TruClient – Overview with Tips and Tricks

Overview

• In LoadRunner 11.5, TruClient for Internet Explorer has been introduced. It is now possible to use TruClient on IE-only web applications.

Note: This still supports only HTML + JavaScript websites. It does not support ActiveX objects or Flash or Java Applets, etc.

• TruClient IE was developed as an add-in for IE 9, so it will not work on earlier versions of IE. This version of IE was the first version to expose enough of the DOM to be usable by a TruClient-style Vusers. Note that your web application must support IE9 in “standard mode”.
• Some features have also been added to TruClient Firefox. These include:
  • The ability to specify think time
  • The ability to set HTTP headers
  • URL filters
  • Event handlers, which can automatically handle intermittent pop-up windows, etc.

• Web page breakdown graphs have been added to TruClient (visible in LoadRunner Analysis). Previously they were only available for standard web Vusers.

Tips and Tricks

NTLM authentication -

Scenario: Some applications when accessed on Mozilla, demand NTLM authentication. If these steps appear while recording,   they don’t get recorded. Hence while replaying, due to the absence of these steps; the application fails to perform the intended transactions.

Solution: To avoid a situation in which an application asks for NTLM authentication while recording and replaying, one has to specify the application as a trusted NTLM resource. To make that, follow these steps.

• Open the file “user.js” located in “%lr_path%\dat\LrWeb2MasterProfile”.
• Locate the preference setting “network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted.uris”.
• Specify the URL of the trusted resource as the value of this setting.
• Save the file “user.js”

These changes are done only where the VUgen is used to develop the script. These changes get saved with the script and apply on different machines during load tests. 

Disable pop-ups during recording -

Scenario: The occurrence of unwanted pop-ups creates hurdles during script development.

Solution: To disable the pop-ups, we can do it by following the below mentioned steps –

• In the Firefox address bar, enter ‘about: config’. Click ‘I’ll be careful, I promise’ tab
• In the filter field, enter disable_open_during_load
• Right click on ‘disable_ open_during_load’ and select ‘Toggle’. The value changes to ‘false’
• Record initial Navigation step again
• Your pop-ups will be disabled

Displaying the value in a parameter or variable -

Scenario: To understand the value that gets stored in a parameter while replaying the script.

Solution: This can be achieved using alert () function.

Example:

var x=”Good Morning”;

window.alert (x);

Calculating number of text occurrences -

Scenario: Scripting of most of the modern internet applications with number of dynamic features demand this requirement. Be it to check the presence of a text on the web page or to count the number of tickets generated in the application during run time, calculating text occurrences and using this count with right logical code.

Solution: In AJAX, using JavaScript functions, we can achieve this objective. This can be done as –

• Drag ‘Evaluate JavaScript code’ from toolbox
• In the arguments section add the following code -
  var splitBySearchWord = (document.body.textContent).split (‘Text to search for);
• Then display the total number of occurrence of the text using Alert () method.
  window.alert (splitBySearchWord. Length);

 

 

Inserting random think time -

Scenario: End-user behavior is unpredictable and as a performance tester, while executing a performance test, our aspiration should always be to reach closest to the real time scenario. Some end users may spend only 2 secs before navigating to the next page, while many others may think for more time. Hence in many test scenarios, it would not be ideal to insert a fixed think time value before a web request; rather one must use random think time in such cases.

Solution: The above scenario can be achieved using advanced JavaScript functionality. They are:

• From ‘Toolbox’, copy a wait function and paste it before the web request
• In the argument section, replace the interval value ’3′ by ‘Math.floor (11*Math.random () +5); ‘

The above function will return a random number between 5 and 15.

Math.floor () method rounds a number Downwards to its nearest integer (Eg. The output of code ’Math.floor (1.8); ‘is 1). Hence 11 are used as a multiplication factor so that an integer in the upper decimals of 10 will be rounded to 10.Math.random () method returns a random number between 0 and 1.

Handling browser cache -

Scenario: You may wish to manage the cache handling features of the browser to replicate different types of test scenarios.

Solution: This can be achieved by following these steps -

• Open the Script under Interactive mode.
• Go to VUser > Run-Time Settings > General > Load mode Browser Settings
• Inside the Settings frame display the option Advanced
• Select the option “Compare the page in cache to the page on the network”; select one of the four values above according to your test requirements

0 = Once per session

1 = Every time the page is accessed

2 = Never

3 = When the page is out of date (Default value)

Conclusion

In Hexaware, we have used TrueClient protocol to record many applications for different clients. Some of the benefits we fruited are as follows – HP TruClient Protocol works with many frameworks like jquery, Ajax, YUI, GWT, JS, etc. Rich internet applications developed on Web 2.0 technologies can be easily scripted and replayed. Script development is interactive with script flow at one side of the window and application opened in the browser at the other. This makes scripting with AJAX TruClient protocol easier and faster. Object identification features minimize the use of complex correlations and make script more dynamic. Thus the scripts become more resilient to back-end changes. Complex client side events like Mouse over, slider bars, calendar items, dynamic lists, etc. can be very easily scripted, customized and replayed. Thus testing cycle is much shorter in case of Ajax TruClient as compared to that with other web protocols. Using AJAX TruClient, API + GUI response time can be obtained, as opposed to other protocols that provide only API response time.