Support for Flash and Flex Applications

Supported Flash and Flex Applications

Supported Protocols

Parameterizing Requests

Remarks

Adobe Flash and Flex applications are downloaded to and run on the client side. While working, these applications may exchange data with the web server.

LoadComplete can load test web applications created with Adobe Flash or Flex of any version. In other words, the tool can record and play back requests a Flash or Flex movie sends to the tested web server and check the server’s responses to these requests.

If the application uses one of the supported protocols (see below), LoadComplete can also provide you with access to the contents of simulated requests and responses.

To exchange data with the web server, Flash and Flex applications use special protocols. In most cases, this is the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol. However, in the application’s code, the developers can implement support for JSON or other protocols.

LoadComplete supports HTTP-based protocols used by Flash and Flex applications:

• AMF (or Action Message Format). This is the protocol that is most frequently used by Flash and Flex applications. AMF is a binary protocol based on SOAP, which, in its turn, is based on HTTP. LoadComplete recognizes AMF requests and lets you view and change their contents. For detailed information on this, see Support for AMF Protocol.

• JSON and other protocols. LoadComplete also supports other HTTP-based protocols that Flash and Flex use to exchange data with web servers. If LoadComplete detects that a request corresponds to one of these protocols, it provides you with access to the request and response contents. For more information, see the topics of the Supported Protocols and Data Formats section.

Support for a protocol means that LoadComplete can --

• Retrieve individual values from server responses’ bodies.

• Encode values into requests that go to the tested web server.

This feature enables you to parameterize simulated requests and pass data from earlier requests to later ones. For complete information on this, see Parameterizing RIA Traffic.

In Flash and Flex applications that use AMF traffic, the traffic does not typically contain web pages, it contains individual AMF requests. As a result, by default, the recoded 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, it is recommended to 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.