Tutorial for Data Merging

Let’s assume you have three URLs a user is required to go through to login into your site and do something.

·      http://myserver/homepage.htm (standard homepage with a login form)

·      http://myserver/login.htm (POST parameters are login/password, this page sets a cookie)

·      http://myserver/data.htm (some GET parameters)

You want to simulate 10 different users logging into the site and going through these 3 urls.

Using Webserver Stress Tool this can be done as follows:

·      On page Test Setup.

·      Select Test Type CLICKS, set number of clicks to 3, set Number of Users to 10

·      On page URLs

·      Set Number of URLs to 3, select All Users follow complete Sequence, Enter the three URLs

·      For URL#2 enter the following in the POSTDATA column:
username=@1@&password=@2@

·      For URL#3 change the URL like this:
http://myserver/data.htm?data=@1@

·      Click on Data Merging

·      Enable Replace Placeholders… and enable Use data1.dat for URL#1…

·      Click on Edit "Datax.dat"

·      Answer "Edit data for what URL" with the value 2

·      enter the username and password combinations into column @1@ and @2@ and click OK

·      Again Click on Edit "Datax.dat"

·      Answer "Edit data for what URL" with the value 3

·      Enter the data  for URL#3 into column @1@ and click OK

·      Click OK again

·      Review all the other settings

·      Run your test

At first, all 10 users send a request for URL#1 which is the plain homepage.

Then each user requests  the login.htm URL  with but the @1@ and @2@ in the POSTDATA field replaced by values from the file data2.dat so that every request is sent with different login data (@1@ is replaced with data from column 1, @2@ for column 2).

If login.html sends a cookie, this cookie is stored individually for each user and is resent with the third request..

For the third click Webserver Stress Tool replaces the @1@ placeholder with the strings from data3.dat, thus sending 10 different GET urls to the server along with the cookies received in run 2.

You can examine the log files to make sure that the data was sent in the way you expected.