Inaugural Season in the Florida Lacrosse Classic

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     Inaugural 2012 Team Roster:

1. You can use the “DataTable.Export” method or “DataTable.ExportSheet” method to literally create a new .xls file of the workbook or specified worksheet, and have this new file saved in your file system (locally or on the network).  With this approach you can then use that datatable/spreadsheet however you want including importing it into the permanent datatable attached to the test script if you want.
   
   
2. Also keep in mind that your Test Results Report will show you the data used and created during the test run.  You can view this in the “Data Table” in the test report itself.
   
   You can then export that data into an external file too, from the report.  The steps are slightly different depending on the version of QTP you are using, but from QTP v11 you would simply select “File > Export to File…” and then select “Data Table” from the “Report type” drop-down list.  When you click the “Export” button you can then specify a new name and location for the data file (.xls).  This will export ALL the data in the datatable (all the worksheets will be exported this way).  Like the previous approach, you now have an external .xls file that you can now do whatever you want with it, including importing it back into the permanent datatable attached to the test script.

“Vision is everything for a leader.  It is utterly indispensable.  Why?  Because vision leads the leaders.  It paints the targets, sparks and fuels the fire within, and draws them forward.

One of the most valuable benefits of vision is that it acts like a magnet – attracting, challenging, and uniting people.  The greater the vision, the more winners it has the potential to attract.  The more challenging the vision, the harder the participants fight to achieve it.

- Leadership Promises for Every Day, John C. Maxwell

One of the biggest failings I see in leadership is the failure to provide a vision.  Too many leaders fail to communicate and motivate their staff with the current company vision.  Too many of them lack a vision or simply assume the staff knows the vision even though its never been communicated.  Don’t fall into this pitfall – provide a vision for your company, department, team and/or staff!

Let’s breakdown this simple script, I have three transaction times being recorded – “trans1″, “trans2″ and “trans3″.  “trans1″ encapulates “trans2″, and “trans3″ logs its own time at the end of the script.

The timers and duration times breakdown as follows:

“trans2″ – this transaction actually completes before the “trans1″ because it is contained within the “trans1″ wrapper (nested within the “trans1″ code), so if we look at the results for “trans2″ you will see that it contains a “wait 3″ statement and an “AddWastedTime” of 1000 milliseconds (which is 1 second).  In looking at the test results report you can see that the “Total Duration” time is 3.0300 seconds (the 3 seconds from the “wait” statement and a slight delay for the execution of the statements themselves) and it also logs the “Wasted Time” of 1 second.

“trans1″ – this has a total duration time of approximately 12 seconds.  Simply add up the “wait” statements contained within the “trans1″ transaction wrapper and add a slight delay for the execution of the statements themselves.  As you can see in this image the “Total Duration” time is 12.1080 seconds.  Now the “Wasted Time” is all the “AddWastedTime” statements contained within the “trans1″ wrapper, so this includes the “Services.AddWastedTime MercuryTimers(“timer1″).Stop” statement (which is a dynamic statement based on the “MercuryTimers(timer1)” wrapper around a subset of code (the “wait 4″ statement in this case – however this would normally be a real chunk of code)) and the “Services.AddWastedTime 1000″ which is a hardcoded value where we are saying that “we want to reduce the time by 1 second”.  Added together this is 5 seconds with a slight delay for the execution of the statements themselves – which as you can see in the test results report is 5.0190 seconds of “Wasted Time”.

“trans3″ – Finally we have the last transaction time being recorded and notice it is outside of the “trans1″ wrapper.  So this is self-contained code at the end of the script and logs its own time which in this case is a hardcoded 1 second using the “Services.AddWastedTime 1000″ statement.  Notice the timers from above do not affect this timer.

As you can see the “Wasted Time” is logged in the Test Results for a normal QTP test process, and realize it is also integrated with LoadRunner and the Business Process Monitor.

Be aware that there are Pros and Cons to using this function in a QuickTest Pro automation script.

Pro: Using this function you can define an Edit box to appear that you can prompt for a value from the user that you can then use in your test script.  The function has several parameters but the most common parameters used are the “prompt” (which is the only required parameter), title and default (which is the default value to automatically pre-populate if you want).  The other parameters are used less often.  The value that is entered is then passed back to the script as a return value and can be captured in a variable to be used within your test script.  Here is an example of using it to retrieve a security code during test execution.

Notice in this image how the statement generates this edit box.  You can then enter a value in the edit field to be passed back to the script like in this image.  Notice the value entered into the edit field, it will be passed back as the return value and in this example it will get stored in the variable “vReturnValue” based off the example in this image.

Notice in this final image, the InputBox statement has been executed and we are now paused on the wait statement so that we can examine the variables.  In looking at the variable in the Debug Viewer, notice how the variable has the value that was entered in the edit box.

Con: The con to using this function in a QuickTest Pro automation script is that it requires interaction from a user.  The biggest goal that you are always trying to achieve with test automation is to get “long term unattended testing” which means your script needs to be able to execute without any user interaction.  This function requires a response from a user and will just sit there forever until it gets a response.  So be careful on using this.  If you really want to use this function then I would recommend putting it at the very beginning of any automated process so that you could enter in all the values immediately and then be able to walk away from the process and let it run independently from you.  However my recommendation on better options for getting a value for your automation is to have this value retrieved from one of these options, retrieve it from:
- a variable or constant from within your test script
- from a text file that the script opens and reads from
- from an environment variable
- or from a parameter passed in from another script

These statements will log the duration time to the Test Results Report, which will tell you how long the “process” that resides between the two statements took to execute.  Typically what you would do is wrap a submission or transaction process to see how long it is taking; like submitting an order or new user profile.  In using the QTP training application we will time the submission of the order, so find the “Insert Order” button statement and your synchronization statement to know when the insert process has completed. 

So just before the “Insert Order” button you would put a Services.StartTransaction “InsertOrder” statement and once you are synchronized on the success of the submission of the order you will have an Services.EndTransaction “InsertOrder” statement (placed right after the sychronization statement).

This will tell you how long it took to insert a new order and you can pass or fail this test step based on your functional requirements as to how long is an acceptable timeframe.  These statements will log the results to the Test Results Report directly and appear like this:

The disadvantage of this statement is that it only logs the results to the Test Results Report, so you don’t have the actual time within the test script in order to code your own logic on passing or failing the statement.  People complained about this for many years and finally they came out with a new function prior to the sale of “Mercury Interactive” to “HP”, so the function name actually has the old company name contained in it.  The functions are “MercuryTimers(“<timer name>”).Start” and “MercuryTimers(“<timer name>”).Stop”.  The Stop function returns the duration time as a return code so you can use it within your test script.  You would use this function the same as the StartTransaction statements; identify were in the test script you want the statements and then type these statements in (note that using the Step Generator will produce the wrong syntax so it is best to just manually type the statement in your test script in the Expert View.

Notice that I added a “msgbox” statement to display the duration time so that you can see how it is returned as a return value into a variable and can be used in the test script.  Notice that the time is returned in milliseconds.

The odd thing is that when Mercury added this function to QTP in order to provide you with the duration time as a return code within the script, they didn’t keep the feature of also logging it to the Test Results Report.  Notice in this image that there is no reference to the fact that the “MercuryTimers” function was executed. 

So if you want to log the time to the Test Results Report (which I highly recommend so that you have a log of the duration time) then you will want to add your own “Reporter.ReportEvent” statement.

And then the report will have entries for each timing and because I used a conditional statement to verify the duration time against the functional requirement of taking less than 6 seconds, I can then pass and fail the statement automatically.

Changing Object Synchronization Timeout from within a QTP script:

To figure out the setting name of other items that you can change, simply open the Test > Settings window and click the Generate script button. This will produce a text file that can be used to launch your QTP instance from a script (basically using the QTP API). We are not going to execute the script but use it to get the proper setting names for the various settings that we can change from within our test script. Open the file in notepad and look at the names. The file should look similar to this:

Other examples of changing settings include:

Changing Object Sync Timeout:

Changing the Test Iteration Mode:

1. “The sign of great leaders is not what they accomplish on their own, but what they accomplish through others.”
2. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams
3. “Your thoughts determine your character…The first person you lead is you.”
4. “One of the greatest gifts leaders can give to those around them is hope.  Never underestimate its power.”
5. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
6. Vision is everything to a leader – read more on my blog post.