This is how diverse my writings are going to be. Testing tools, that’s it. I could write about my adventures in photography but that wouldn’t be very interesting until I put some more time and money into it. Even though I’ve been using my 50mm f/1.8 lens with some interesting results, I still feel that there’s lots more I need to learn before I can write about it …maybe someday soon. But this one is about a different, though as interesting topic - handling XML objects in QTP.
Background:
I’m currently involved in test automation for IDM application. If you are familiar with Sun’s IDM product, you know that all objects are stored in database as XML and these objects can be viewed/checked out/edited through the debug interface. Now the way we have customized it is that managers (users with Manager role) or end users are allowed to submit requests for creating users or modifying users’ attributes. The requests are submitted through the user interface and the workflows take care of taking appropriate actions in the background. There is very little information displayed on the web page once the request is submitted that can be used to validate if the action actually succeeded or not. The only way to validate that the action was successful is to either login through admin interface and check the task results or through debug pages, pull up the user’s XML object and verify the changes have gone through.
As I was creating the BPT components and test cases to handle different test scenarios, it was increasingly obvious to me that the most foolproof way to validate the results of the test would be to create a component that validates the user’s XML. I wasn’t much familiar with handling XML objects in VBScript so I left it for later. And later is now (or was yesterday). So I spent yesterday going through the XML Document Object Model (DOM) and Microsoft’s implementation of it and creating a VBScript function to validate an XML’s attribute value. It worked out fine with a little initial struggle.
Please keep in mind that what I’m providing below is in no way a complete solution of using XMLDOM to do whatever you want to do. All I needed to do was to retrieve an attribute value from an XML using the XPath that is provided as input parameter and to compare it with the expected value. What you want do with XMLDOM may be different and based on your application’s and automation needs. The reason I’m posting this is that if you’re using XMLDOM with QTP/VBScript for the first time, you can avoid the initial struggle that I went through and get the job done faster.
For Microsoft DOM reference (this is where I got most of the information I needed), visit this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms764730(VS.85).aspx. The XPath language is described at: http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath
Solution:
1. The first step is to create a parser object and load the XML. The XML can be from a file or from a string. Here I’m using the loadXML() method to load it from the innertext property of a WebElement object that I retrieved earlier. To use a file, use the load() method instead.
Set xmlDoc = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM") xmlDoc.async = false xmlDoc.loadXML(objs(0).GetROProperty("innertext"))
You set the async property to false so that it doesn’t move on before the document is completely loaded. The reason I’m using CreateObject(“Microsoft.XMLDOM”) instead of XMLUtil.CreateXML() which is provided in QTP OM Reference is that when I used that, it gave me an error specifying that it couldn’t find the DTD file referenced in the XML. It seems that it needs the DTD if it’s mentioned in XML to be able to load it. I had the DTD and when I uploaded it to my local component folder, it worked fine. But since I could be running the test on a remote host, I didn’t want to have to upload that DTD to all my host machines. And I didn’t look into any other way. But if you decided to use the XMLData object provided by QTP, the objects and method names are different even though the overall steps will be the same. For example, to load the document, you’ll use:
Set xmlDoc = XMLUtil.CreateXML() xmlDoc.load(objs(0).GetROProperty("innertext"))
2. Once you have the XML object, you need to get to the desired element. I kept it simple and asked for the XPath to the desired element as an input parameter. Once I have that, I used the selectNodes() method to get all the nodes in the desired XPath.
Set objNodes = xmlDoc.selectNodes(nodeXPath)This gives me a collection of all the nodes (specifically, the IXMLDOMNodeList object) that match the specified parameter ‘nodeXPath’. With QTP XMLData, you can use:
Set objNodes = xmlDoc.ChildElementsByPath(nodeXPath)If nodeXPath is invalid or doesn’t match any elements, the length of the collection will be 0.
3. So now, I need to check the length of the collection and get to the actual element that I want. Since I didn’t need to care if multiple elements match the XPath, I just took the first element in the collection. The item property returns a single node (IXMLDOMNode) from the collection specified by the index, in this case 0.
If objNodes.length > 0 Then Set objNode = objNodes.item(0)
4. Now that I have the actual element, I need to get the value of specified attribute. The getAttribute(name) method returns the value of the ‘name’ attribute. The attribute name and its expected value are passed as input parameters:
If StrComp(attrValue, objNode.getAttribute(attrName), vbTextCompare) = 0 Then 'expected value matches actual value
attrValue is the input parameter containing the expected value and attrName is the attribute name. If it matches, I write a Pass in the results and if not, it’s a fail. Once done, I clean up the objects.
Set xmlDoc = Nothing Set objNodes = Nothing Set objNode = Nothing
That’s pretty much it. Once we start using the component actively, I may come up with some more ideas to improve it. I’ll write about it if they provide me enough of a challenge.
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Sample XML:
<User name="abcdefg" creator="Configurator" email="a.a@x.com" disabled="false" locked="false"> <Roles> <ObjectRef name="Employee" isWeak="false"/> </Roles> <Attribute name="employmenttype" type="string" value="Employee" syntax="string"/> <Attribute name="firstname" type="string" value="a" syntax="string"/> <Attribute name="fullname" type="string" value="a, a" syntax="string"/> <Attribute name="ismanager" type="string" value="true" syntax="string"/> <Attribute name="lastname" type="string" value="a" syntax="string"/> <Attribute name="middlename" type="string" value="M" syntax="string"/> <Attribute name="phone" type="string" value="9999999999" syntax="string"/> <AdminRoles> <ObjectRef type="AdminRole" name="Manager" isWeak="false"/> </AdminRoles> </User>
For example, the XPath to get to <Attribute> with name=employmenttype is: User/Attribute[@name='employmenttype’]
