Automated Web Test

This is a follow up of the previous posting about LoadRunner and Flex applications. The issue with LoadRunner interfereing with the Flex application during recording was solved. It had been an issue with the recording engine.

Two solutions were offered by HP and the first one worked fine.

Changing the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mercury Interactive\LoadRunner\Protocols\HTTP\Analyzer in the registry and set AddNoCacheHeaderToHtml to 0.

The second solution offerred was to go under recording options –> Network –> Port Mapping –> set Capture Level to “WinINet level data”.

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LoadRunner 9.1’s Flex protocol includes both AMF3 and Http protocols in its options. For testing applications using Flex and AMF3 protocols, these options need to be explicitly added in the recording options. To do this:

1. Click on options in the recording window.

2. Check the AMF and Http protocols in the Recording Options window under the subhead - Protocols.

3. Check the “Try to encode externizable object” option in the “Code Generation” Subhead of Recording Options window.

Recording after these options are checked would give more readable code as XML rather than Binary.

What is Macromedia Flex?

Macromedia Flex is a commercial presentation layer server that produces Rich Internet Applications. The Flash plug-in (available on most browsers) is the runtime environment for Flex applications.

An example Flex application.

Developers use two core languages to create Flex applications. The first core language is MXML, the Macromedia Flex Markup Language, which includes a rich set of XML tags that allows developers to layout user interfaces. Some MXML constructs allow you to call remote objects, store data returned in a model, and customize your own look and feel to MXML components.

The second core language for Flex development is ActionScript 2.0, which is similar to JavaScript. ActionScript elements are coded inside MXML pages, has robust event handling capabilities to allow the application to respond to dynamic user interactions. Unlike JavaScript, since ActionScript runs inside the Flash plug-in there is no need to rewrite several versions of the same code to support different browsers.

The Flex server is responsible for translating the MXML and ActionScript components into Flash bytecode in the form of .SWF files. The SWF file is executed on the client in the Flash runtime environment. The Flex
server provides other services such as caching, concurrency, and handling remote object requests.

Remote Objects (Action Message Format, AMF)

Automated Test Tool vendors Segue(Silk Performer), Mercury(LoadRunner), and IBM Rational(Performance Tester) offer capable performance testing tools, allowing you to performance-test the applications that use web services, XML, or HTTP connections. Mercury and Segue also goes the extra mile to provide AMF (Action Message Format) support in their performance testing tool. But the problem we have now is that the AMF has moved from AMF0 to AMF3.

Now the existing AMF add-ins of these tools does not support the AMF3 protocol. Flex applications now use what is called Remote Objects in ActionScript which are not handled by existing performance testing tools.

What now?

Looks like we have to wait for something to come up that can performance test these applications. And now along comes Silverlight from Microsoft… hmmm?