4.13.x

XLT 4.13.2

Test Framework

Actions not always marked as failed in case of exceptions (#3286)

Test cases may use “inline actions”, i.e. the action boundaries are created by calling the startAction()/stopAction() methods. If such an action failed with an exception, this action was not always marked as failed in the test results. As a consequence, when creating the load test report later on, this action was not counted as failed and the corresponding transaction did also not provide the name of the failing action. Fixed now.

Result browser links missing in load test report (#3891)

Under rare circumstances there was no result browser link in the load test report although the transaction had indeed failed with an exception and a corresponding result browser was available on disk. In those cases the information where the result browser can be found did not make it into the load test result files so it couldn’t be reconstructed during report generation.

In order to improve this situation, the result browser info is no longer attached to the exception stack trace, but stored separately to the timers.csv files as new fields of the transaction data record.

Load Testing

ec2_admin: Support new AWS data centers (#3778)

Recently, Amazon opened new data centers in Hong Kong (ap-east-1) and Bahrain (me-south-1). These two data centers are fully supported in ec2_admin now.

ec2_admin: Allow choosing VPC and subnet (#3914)

When starting machine instances in a certain region/availability zone, AWS needs to know the subnet into which the machines are to be launched. Previously, ec2_admin silently chose a default subnet or, if there is no default subnet, the first subnet found. In more complex environments with multiple VPCs, each having a default and multiple non-default subnets per availability zone, this approach may easily lead to unexpected results. That’s why ec2_admin now checks if there are multiple VPCs/subnets in the target region/availability zone and, if so, prompts the user to select the desired one.

Note that choosing VPC and subnet is currently supported in interactive mode only. There is no command line option for this purpose yet.

XLT 4.13.1

Test Framework

Encoded ampersand in URI path not preserved (#3661)

URI path segments may contain characters which are reserved according to RFC3986 in percent-encoded form. However, since Apache HttpClient 4.5.8 (used by HtmlUnit 2.35) percent-encoded ampersand characters in URI path segments are not preserved any longer but written in decoded form to the wire. So http://localhost/wild%26free/index.html is automatically converted to http://localhost/wild&free/index.html.

It is not clear yet, whether this behavior is a bug or a feature of HttpClient. Anyway, many servers are not prepared for clients performing this conversion and would return redirects or error pages in this case. Since this functionality cannot be turned off in HttpClient, we have decided to ship XLT with the older HttpClient 4.5.6 instead.

XLT Jenkins Plugin

bq(note). XLT now ships with the XLT Jenkins Plugin 1.3.3, which fixes some issues. See below for more information. We recommend to update your Jenkins installation accordingly. The plugin can be found in directory <xlt>/tools/xlt-jenkins-plugin-1.3.3.

URLs of started EC2 instances not passed to XLT (#3623)

If the plugin is configured to use AWS EC2 instances for the load test, the instances are started prior to the load test and terminated after it, but XLT was not configured correctly to actually use them. Fixed.

Load test results lost if report generation failed (#3668)

In case the generation of the load test report or the difference report failed for any reason, the results of the performed load test were lost as build artifacts were saved only if the generation of load test and difference reports had finished successfully. Now this step is performed prior to report generation.

XLT 4.13.0

Test Framework

Result Browser

Request timeline - In order to let you inspect the temporal sequence and duration of requests in a graphical timeline view, XLT may now generate an HTTP Archive (HAR) file along with an appropriate viewer as part of the result browser. The HAR file contains information about all requests/responses grouped by their corresponding action, including headers, sizes, and network timings. For client-performance tests, page load event timings are included as well. In order to save valuable disk space, the response content is NOT included in the generated HAR files.

To enable this feature, add the following line to your test configuration:

com.xceptance.xlt.output2disk.writeHarFile = true

The HAR viewer can be opened either by clicking the View as HAR link in the result browser or directly by opening the harviewer.html file in the root directory of the result browser.

HAR Viewer

Request body for PUT and PATCH - On the Request/Response Information tab, the XLT Result Browser shows almost all information about a certain request at a glance. For POST requests, either the form data or (a part of) the raw request body is shown as well. Now the raw request body of PUT and PATCH requests is also shown this way. Especially if the request body is small, you will often get the information you need without having to switch to the Request Body tab and back again.

Other Improvements

ExclusiveDataProvider to filter out comment lines - The ExclusiveDataProvider can now be configured to filter out comment lines from its test data file, i.e. lines that start with #. Previously, this was the responsibility of the data item parser. If the ExclusiveDataProvider handles comment lines the benefits are twofold:

The logic of the data item parser can be simpler.
The resulting exclusive data partitions, one for each agent, are sized more equally as comment lines are filtered out before partitioning the data.

If you want the ExclusiveDataProvider to filter out comment lines, create it as follows:

edp = ExclusiveDataProvider.getInstance(“coupons.txt”, true);

Maximize browser window - XLT can manage the life cycle of web drivers and web browsers on your behalf, but you may configure many aspects in the settings of your test suite, for instance the dimension of the browser window. As an alternative to a fixed browser window size, you may now configure XLT to maximize the browser window instead:

xlt.webDriver.window.maximize = true

Please note that this setting overrides any window size settings if present as well.

HtmlUnit updated - HtmlUnit and its accompanying HtmlUnitDriver have been updated to version 2.35.

Incompatible Changes

PhantomJSDriver removed - As the PhantomJS project reached its end of life and the latest available version of PhantomJSDriver stopped working using the latest version of Selenium/WebDriver, the support for PhantomJS has been dropped from XLT.

Last modified May 25, 2022