Web Test Playback Enhancements

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This post will give you an overview of some of the enhancements to the web test playback UI. Most of the enhancements to this UI were added to make it easier to quickly read your results and find errors in your scripts. Here is a list of the enhancements.

1. Request Tree in top pane more closely resembles the Web Test editor: In VS 2005 all requests except dependent requests were added at the same level. This made it more difficult to figure out what requests were the result of redirects. The request grid also did not show transactions or comments. Now the UI in playback with closely match the web test editor. So if you have a transaction which contains requests, you will see a transaction branch with the requests as children to the transaction. Also redirected requests will appear as children of the initial request. This makes it much easier to follow a chain of redirected requests. The screen shot below is an example of the new UI. In this screenshot Browse and Purchase are transactions. You can also see which requests were the results of redirects.

 

 

2. Toolbar buttons for navigating through requests: There are a few new buttons on the web test editor toolbar for helping navigate through the requests. I think the most useful are the “Find next error” and “Find Previous Error”. You can use these buttons to jump right to requests that failed.

3. Request Parameters broken out: If you click on the a request and then click the request tab, you will see that headers, Cookies, Query String parameters and Form Post Parameters are broken out into easy to read tables. You can still get the old view to see the raw data, but this view makes it much easier to see what is being sent with a request.

 

 

 

4. View Response in HTML Editor- It is hard to search through the responses in the response tab. A button has been added to let you open the response in an html editor which makes it much easier to read and search through the response.

 

The enhancements to this UI should make it easier to view your results. These changes were part of Beta 1, so if you download the beta, you can start using this today!