IBM Performance Management

Structuring complex scripts

Organize a complex script into multiple scripts; then, save scripts together in a collection of scripts.

About this task

If you create a complex script, you can organize that script into simple scripts that represent different business or user processes on your web application. Save the scripts together as a test suite. You can then use these scripts to monitor the performance and availability of your web application in response to specific user actions in the Application Performance Dashboard.

Important: It is good practice to organize complex scripts into separate scripts, where each script represents a typical user or business process that you want to monitor. For example, create separate scripts that record when a user logs in to a website, or searches for an item. If you organize your scripts according to user or business processes, you can then monitor the response of your web application to these specific processes in the Application Performance Dashboard.

Procedure

To organize your complex script into separate scripts, and save your scripts as a test suite, complete the following steps:

  1. To create a separate script for each user process that is recorded in your script, click File > New Test Case in Selenium-IDE. Give each script a meaningful name that describes the user process and save each script as a .html file, such as load_homepage.html. For more information, see Recording synthetic scripts.
    Important: The name that you give to your script in Selenium-IDE is the name that identifies the recorded business or user process that you monitor in the Application Performance Dashboard.
  2. In Selenium-IDE, open a complex script that you recorded previously. Organize your script commands into separate scripts, according to different user actions. Cut commands from the original complex script in the Test Case window, and Paste commands into the different scripts. Save each script again.

    For example, the complex script in Recording synthetic scripts contains Selenium-IDE commands for three different user processes.

    • Open the Performance Management home page on the IBM® Marketplace website.
    • Open the Details page on IBM Marketplace.
    • Open the View demo page.

    The user actions are then organized into three different scripts.

    Table 1. Sample script for opening the IBM Marketplace page (load_homepage.html)
    Command Target Value
    open /  
    verifyTitle IBM Performance Management - United States  
    Table 2. Sample script for opening the Details page on IBM Marketplace(load_products.html)
    Command Target Value
    clickAndWait //div[@id='product-header']/div/div/div/ul/li/ul/li[2]/a/span  
    Table 3. Sample script for opening the View demo page on IBM Marketplace (load_APM.html)
    Command Target Value
    clickAndWait link=View demo  
    assertText id=btn_submitform Yes, I’d like to watch the demo.
    assertText link=IBM's Privacy statement IBM's Privacy statement
  3. To save your individual script files together in a test suite, click File > Save Test Suite As. Save the test suite as a .html file. Finally, compress the test suite and individual scripts files together in a .zip file. The .zip file must contain the test suite and any script files that are included in the test suite.

Results

You recorded a set of scripts that you can use to monitor the performance and availability of your web applications. Use the Synthetic Script Manager to upload your .zip file of scripts to a new or existing synthetic transaction. For more information, see Creating and editing a synthetic transaction.