LinkScan

LinkScan Reference Manual

Section 20

  Previous   Contents   Next   Help   Reference   HowTo   Card 

LinkScan Recorder

Introduction

The LinkScan™ Recorder is a Windows application that interfaces with Microsoft Internet Explorer. It may be used to capture real web browsing sessions, such as a complex order entry sequence. The captured recording includes all of the data entered into any associated forms. LinkScan may then be configured to replay the recording on demand, validating every link on each form and results page in the sequence.

Hence LinkScan and the LinkScan Recorder provide powerful and convenient capabilities for the rapid and comprehensive regression testing of complex transaction-based systems.

Applications

The principal applications of the LinkScan Recorder are:

  1. To capture user-sequences, such as an on-line shopping or purchase procedure. These are typically complex sequences that are time consuming to test regularly and comprehensively. They are also tend to be some of the most important pages on a website or Intranet application.

    Once a sequence has been recorded, you may use the LinkScan Recorder to replay it and display the results in an Internet Explorer Window. More importantly, LinkScan may be configured to automatically replay the same steps and validate every link on each page in the sequence.

  2. To capture special URL's that are used to define the start of a site scan. This is typically required when the site uses a login page and cookie arrangement for access control. The URL's may be used as the main starting point for a scan (Homeurl/Homefile) or as additional seed links for a full site scan (Extrahome).

    Note: forms-based login procedures are completely different from HTTP authentication schemes. In the first case, users fill out a regular HTML form. In the latter case, the users browser presents an authentication challenge within a pop-up dialog box.

Using the LinkScan Recorder

Start the LinkScan Recorder by pressing the Record button on the main LinkScan Window, or by executing the recorder.exe program in the LinkScan installation folder. This will open two Windows; the LinkScan Recorder window and an associated copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer with an empty home page. The LinkScan Recorder Window looks like this:

LinkScan Recorder

The interface includes a number of simple command buttons:

Note that when the LinkScan Recorder is inactive (i.e. in Stop mode) you may edit the URL's in the current recording using the mouse and keyboard. The Control-C and Control-V keys may be used to copy and paste highlighted text to and from the Windows Clipboard.

Importing a Saved Recording into LinkScan

Once you have completed a recording, use the Save button to write the recording to disk. It is stored in plain ASCII text and may be edited using Windows Notepad or any other similar program. Specifically, you may wish to annotate each line/URL in the sequence with a comment. Simply append one or more <TAB> characters after the URL followed by your comment. LinkScan will process those comments much like the anchor text associated with a normal HTML hyperlink.

The recording is now in a suitable format for processing by LinkScan. On Windows systems, simply create a new Project (i.e. configuration) and select the Edit Project dialog. The following items must be configured:

Please see the Import Scanning section of the LinkScan Reference Manual for further details on this topic.

LinkScan Recorder and Unix Systems

The LinkScan Recorder is a Microsoft Windows application and does not run on Unix systems. However, the LinkScan Recorder is included with the LinkScan Unix distributions and it may be moved to a Windows system so that recordings may be prepared. Those recordings may be saved as simple ASCII text files for transfer to the Unix system where they may be processed by LinkScan. All of the LinkScan Import Features are, of course, fully supported on the Unix platforms.

To install the LinkScan Recorder, copy (e.g. with FTP) the following files from the LinkScan directory on the Unix system to a Windows machine:

FileRequiredFormat
recorder.exeRequiredBinary
docs/links19.htmlOptionalAscii
docs/lsrule.gifOptionalBinary
docs/newlogo.gifOptionalBinary
docs/ssrec.jpgOptionalBinary

The LinkScan Recorder executable requires the Microsoft Visual Basic runtime libraries. If these are not already installed on your Windows system, you may download the self-extracting archive from our website: http://www.elsop.com/download/vbrun60.exe.

Special Considerations

The following points are worthy of note and consideration:

  1. The data captured by the LinkScan Recorder includes POSTED form values that are normally invisible/hidden. The name-value pairs are represented using the special LinkScan URL convention based on the double question-mark. Hence forms utilizing the GET method are represented in the normal manner, for example:

    http://www.example.com/form.cgi?Name=John%20Doe&Country=USA

    Whereas, forms utilizing the POST method are represented thus:

    http://www.example.com/form.cgi??Name=John%20Doe&Country=USA

  2. If a website uses <FRAMESETS>, the individual frames within each frameset must be added to the import file to achieve full test coverage. Otherwise, LinkScan would view the frameset as a page, checking the links to each frame but not validating the links within the individual frames. The LinkScan Recorder will capture the URL of each frame automatically.

LinkScan Reference Manual. Section 20. LinkScan Recorder
LinkScan Version 9.0
© Copyright 1997-2001 Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop)
LinkScan™ and Elsop™ are Trademarks of Electronic Software Publishing Corporation

  Previous   Contents   Next   Help   Reference   HowTo   Card