Support for Ajax Applications

Supported Technologies

Parameterizing Requests

Remarks

Ajax applications can exchange data with a remote server using various protocols and data formats, including HTTP, JSON and XML. LoadComplete supports these technologies so that you can effectively test Ajax applications:

• HTTP. LoadComplete can record and play back any HTTP GET and POST requests. These include web page and resource requests, form submission requests and so on. LoadComplete also lets you customize URL parameters in GET requests and HTML form fields in POST requests of the application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data types in order to run the test with different data sets. For more information, see Editing Scenarios.

• JSON. LoadComplete detects HTTP requests and responses that contain JSON data, parses this data and shows it in a tree-like form for easy viewing. You can see field names, types and values, arrays, custom objects and so on. For more information, see Support for JSON Format.

• XML.LoadComplete detects HTTP requests and responses containing XML data, parses this data and shows it in a tree-like form. You can see XML element names, attributes and values.

LoadComplete support for JSON and XML requests and responses allows you to --

• Extract values from server responses to variables.

• Replace recorded values in requests with variables.

This lets you parameterize simulated requests and re-use dynamic parameter values returned in responses in subsequent requests. For more information, see Parameterizing Rich Internet Application Traffic and Data Correlation.

In Ajax applications, user actions typically trigger individual JSON and XML requests rather than load web pages. As a result, by default, the recorded traffic may include a long list of requests, and it may be difficult to view and analyze it.

To make the traffic easier to understand, you can wrap the recorded JSON and XML requests into custom pages. For more information on this, see Defining Custom Pages.

Using custom pages brings one more benefit: you can use LoadComplete features for randomizing web pages’ think time and make virtual user behavior closer to real user activity. For information on the think time settings, see Setting Think Time Behavior.