3 Ways to Get Started with CloudPort – Capture

This is part of a 3 part series on creating simulated services. CloudPort comes with a proxy capture tool to Capture and then replay a simulated version of the service that currently exists. A simulated, response will remain static, and not effect data integrity of the enablers, but can be load or otherwise used for testing. Workflow and tasks allow for some additional intelligence, but we keep this about getting started.

Lets use iTunes RESTful JSON service. Since I have this song in my head, and the documentation for how to use this service is available. As you will see, the response can be quiet lengthy.

1. Lets test the actual service first. Open SOAPSonar, and File, New Test Group, right-click, New JSON Test Case, and rename it Direct. Paste

http://itunes.apple.com/search?term=alt-J

into the URI and method as GET. Commit and send.

1 direct

2. Now in CloudPort, select Tools from the menus bar, then Proxy Server Traffic Capture Tool.  Make the local port 8888 (easy for me to remember) and then paste itunes.apple.com into the remote server and Start Proxy Recording. You now capturing all requests made to your local machine on port 8888, which is then forwarded to itunes.apple.com.

2 Proxy

3. In SOAPSonar now, lets send the request to be captured. Clone Direct test case and rename it Proxy. Now change the URI from itunes.apple.com to 127.0.0.1:8888 which is your local machine running CloudPort on port 8888.  The entire query will look like

http://127.0.0.1:8888/search?term=alt-J.

Commit and send.

3 Capture

4. You can send as many queries to that domain to capture as you need to match with your test cases you will run. Lets add a second. Clone proxy and change the URI to  

http://127.0.0.1:8888/search?term=the+black+keys.

Commit and send.

7 Rename

5. You can see the request (header) and the response in the capture tool. Stop the Proxy and Export Data to File. Give it a name you remember and save it. The close the Proxy tool.

5 export

6. Now we need to import the captured file. File, Import, Proxy Server Traffic Capture. We know its JSON, so lets select that vs. leave as auto detect. Either should work, although some services dont always adhere to all standards. Find your captured file. When you import, CloudPort asks if you would like to keep response timing. If you say yes, the new simulated services will perform at the same response times. Select No.

6 import

7. Now you should have a NewSimulation1 with 2 Tests. If you select the first, you see in the Request tab,  URL /search?term=alt-J Rule: Exists as 1st rule. The second test URL /search?term=the+black+keys Rule: Exists. Rename your Tests to alt-J search and Black_keys search.

7 Rename

8. If you select the Response tab, you can see the JSON response captured. If you wanted to make any changes you could could just edit it here.  At the bottom is a tab for the JSON, but you can also see the Response Runtime Variables in much the same way you see them in SOAPSonar.

8 response

9. lastly, we can set the network listener location and port. Lets name this Listener iTunes Tutorial, leave the IP as 0.0.0.0 (all machines) and change the port to 8888. Lets leave the URI / and commit. Now the simulated service will run on localhost or http://127.0.0.1:8888/

9 listener

10. Now lets run the simulation in the realtime player. Select Start Local Simulation by clicking on the green arrow icon. The Free Simulation Player launches and you can see the iTunes Tutorial Simulated service. Below are the 2 services we captured. Copy the URI.

10. player

11. Now lets “test” these new simulated services. Clone or add 2 new services and use http://127.0.0.1:8888 and then the query for

  • http://127.0.0.1:8888/search?term=alt-J and GET
  • http://127.0.0.1:8888/search?term=the+black+keys and GET

Commit and send each one.

11 Simulated

Did you get a response? Can you tell it is different? Perhaps I need to do another tutorial showing a regression test of a real service vs a virtialized?

Comments/ questions?