Working with Recordings in Eggplant Performance
You can record yourself interacting with the system under test (SUT), whether that's visiting a website, or using an application which talks to a server over a network, or accessing a Citrix session remotely. The resulting recording can then be used to generate a Virtual User script. The script enables the virtual user (VU) to perform the same interactions automatically, so many VUs can simulate many users to test performance.
Creating a Recording
- Right-click the Recordings folder (or a custom Recordings folder) in the Project tree, and then click New recording.
- The Create a New Recording wizard appears. After this has finished, the new recording appears in the Project tree under the folder you selected.
Importing an Existing Recording
- Right-click the Recordings folder (or a custom Recordings folder) in the Project tree, click Import, and then click one of the options on the sub-menu.
- Navigate to an existing recording file, and then click Open.
The recording file you selected is copied into the current project directory (along with any supporting files and folders), and the recording appears in the Project tree under the folder you selected.
Viewing a Recording
There are several ways to view a recording.
- Right-click the recording item in the Project tree, and then click View.
OR, click the View button on the Recording View.
OR, go to Recording > View.
- The recording file opens in a suitable application.
Creating Data Sources from a Recording
You can create data dictionaries and data tables from recordings.
- Right-click the recording in the Project tree, then select New data source. You also can select a recording, then go to Recordings > Create data source.
- Select Create a new table or Create a new dictionary, as appropriate. Follow the instructions for creating a data dictionary or creating a data table.
Generating a Script from a Recording
A recording cannot be used in a performance test. Instead a VU script must be generated from the recording.
- Right-click the recording in the Project tree, then click Generate script(s).
- OR click the Generate script(s) button on the Recording View.
The Script Generation wizard appears. After this has finished, the new script appears in the Project tree under the Scripts folder.
If a script should be regenerated with different options, or the recording has changed, there are various ways to achieve this:
- On the Recording View, select the script in the Scripts generated from this recording table, and then click Regenerate selected script.
- OR, on the Script View, click the Regenerate button in the Generated from recording section.
The Script Generation wizard appears with the fields pre-populated, and a warning about overwriting the script displays.
Other Tasks
When you right-click a recording item in the Project tree, you also have the options to Rename, Clone, and Delete it, as well as Move it to a custom folder.
You can right-click a recording item in the Project tree and select the Rename transaction option to rename a transaction. For instance, perhaps you need to change the transaction name due to it being misspelled or being different from an imported recording.
To view the changed transaction name, open the recording in the Web Log Viewer and do a search on the new transaction name. See Using the Web Log Viewer for more information.
Note that Eggplant Performance uses the new transaction name when generating a script from the recording. If these changed transaction names appear in scripts, Eggplant Performance uses them when calculating response times (the main performance indicators) in both Test Controller and Analyzer.
For more complete information about recording and creating scripts from recordings, see Recording and Script Generation.