Accessing Rational® Test Automation Server

When your test projects have resources that require access to Rational® Test Automation Server, you can enable access when running the test resources from Rational® Integration Tester, command-line client, Ant CLI, Maven CLI, or in a REST API call. With access to Rational® Test Automation Server you can also retrieve secrets defined in the Rational® Test Automation Server project and use the secrets when running tests.

Prerequisites

Before you can access Rational® Test Automation Server, certain tasks must be completed:
  • You must have installed and configured Rational® Test Automation Server. For more information about Rational® Test Automation Server, see Accessing test assets from a server project.
  • Optionally, if you are retrieving secrets, then you must have set up your project in a team space on Rational® Test Automation Server and created a secrets collection containing secrets in that project.
  • You must have logged in to Rational® Test Automation Server and copied the offline user token generated by using the Offline Token option from the Rational® Test Automation Server Header. See Generating an offline user token. You must have retained the token copy because this offline user token is used to access Rational® Test Automation Server.

Generating an offline user token

  1. Log into Rational® Test Automation Server.
  2. Click the image of the user action icon. icon in the Rational® Test Automation Server Header and click the Offline Tokens option.
  3. Click Create Token.
  4. Click within the token field to copy the offline user token to the clipboard.

    You can paste the copied offline user token in a text document to use the offline user token at a later time.

Note: The offline user token that is generated is specific to the member who generated the token and the token is neither stored on the Rational® Test Automation Server nor is retrievable from the Rational® Test Automation Server at a later time.

Using the offline token

The offline user token enables you to connect to Rational® Test Automation Server from Rational® Integration Tester.

After you enable access to Rational® Test Automation Server, you can perform the following operations:
  • Configure Rational® Integration Tester to publish test reports to Rational® Test Automation Server.
  • Access secrets configured in a project in a team space on Rational® Test Automation Server to be used across different testing environments and during test execution runtime.

You can paste the generated offline user token in the Rational® Integration Tester UI. See Accessing Rational Test Automation Server from Rational Integration Tester.

Locating the used offline token

The offline user token that you generated and copied from Rational® Test Automation Server and used in the Rational® Integration Tester UI is stored in the .userProfile file. The token is stored under the attribute server.securityToken with the generated offline user token as its value.

The .userProfile file can be found in the .integrationtester subdirectory of the User's home directory. For example, the path to the .userProfile file can be C:\Users\<CurrentUser>\.integrationtester.

Offline user token environment variable

An offline user token can be configured in any of the following ways:

When running test resources in the Rational® Integration Tester UI, the offline user token defined in the .userProfile file is used to access Rational® Test Automation Server. If there is no token configured in the .userProfile file, then the token in the RTCP_OFFLINE_TOKEN variable is used.

When running test resources in the non-GUI methods, the value of the RTCP_OFFLINE_TOKEN variable is used in preference to the token found in the .userProfile file.

Accessing Rational® Test Automation Server from Rational® Integration Tester

You can access Rational® Test Automation Server from Rational® Integration Tester so that you can retrieve the secrets configured for a project in a team space and stored on Rational® Test Automation Server or to publish test reports from Rational® Integration Tester to Rational® Test Automation Server.

Before you begin

Before you use Rational® Integration Tester to access Rational® Test Automation Server, certain tasks must be completed. See Prerequisites.

About this task

After you have generated an offline user token in Rational® Test Automation Server, you must configure Rational® Integration Tester to access Rational® Test Automation Server.

Procedure

  1. Open your project. From the Rational® Integration Tester window, click Browse to browse to the location of your project, select the project, and click OK.
    You can add the copied offline user token in either of the following ways:
    • Adding the offline user token by using the Project Settings option. Go to Step 2.
    • Adding the offline user token by using the Project Preferences option. Go to Step 3.
Adding the offline user token by using the Project Settings option
  1. Open the Server Settings tab from Project > Server Settings. In the Server Settings tab window, complete the following steps:
    1. Click the Rational® Test Automation Server check box.
    2. Enter the host name of the server hosting Rational® Test Automation Server in the Secure host field.
      Note: Enter the host name and not the URL. The default port configured is 443. If you have configured a different port, enter that port number.
    3. Paste the offline user token you copied that you generated by using the Offline Token option in Rational® Test Automation Server.
    4. Click SSL, select an option if different from the one selected and then click OK.
    5. Test the connection to Rational® Test Automation Server by clicking Test.
      Important: You must enter the offline user token before you can test the connection to Rational® Test Automation Server.

      A Connection OK dialog box is displayed for a successful connection. An error dialog box is displayed for an unsuccessful connection.

    6. Select the project in a team space on Rational® Test Automation Server that you want to access by completing the following steps:
      1. Click Select in the Project panel.
        Note: The projects that you can access that are contained in the different team spaces on Rational® Test Automation Server are displayed implying that the connectivity to Rational® Test Automation Server is enabled with the use of the offline token.
      2. In the Select Project window, click the project in the team space that you want to select from the list.
      3. Click OK.
      4. Click OK to save the Rational® Test Automation Server settings.
Adding the offline user token by using the Project Preferences option
  1. Click Project > Preferences > Server Settings. In the Server Settings window, complete the following steps:
    Note: You can add the offline user token using this option to enable the access to Rational® Test Automation Server in methods that require an offline user token, for example, when running tests from the command-line client.
    1. Click the Show server URL validation failed dialog check box.
    2. Paste the offline user token in the Rational® Test Automation Server Offline Token field.
    3. Click Apply and then click OK to apply, save, and exit from the dialog.
    Note: If you added the Rational® Test Automation Server offline user token by using the Project Settings option, the same token is displayed in the Preferences for the Server Settings.

    You can view the offline user token that you added, which gets stored in the .userProfile file located in .integrationtester subdirectory of the home directory. For more information, see Locating the used offline token.

Results

You have configured Rational® Integration Tester to access Rational® Test Automation Server.

What to do next

You can retrieve the secrets created and stored in a secret collection in a project in a team space on Rational® Test Automation Server from Rational® Integration Tester. For instructions, see Retrieving secrets from Rational Test Automation Server.

Accessing Rational® Test Automation Server from IntegrationTesterCmd, ANT CLI, Maven CLI, or in a REST API call

When you are running test resources in projects from IntegrationTesterCmd, ANT CLI, Maven CLI, or in a REST API call, and the resources in the project require to access Rational® Test Automation Server you can use an optional parameter or attribute in your command argument.

Before you begin

Before you can access Rational® Test Automation Server, certain tasks must be completed. See Prerequisites.

You must have configured the offline user token environment variable. See Offline user token environment variable.

About this task

When you are running a test from the command line, ANT CLI, or as a REST API call, the following action is taken by the test engine:
  • The value of the RTCP_OFFLINE_TOKEN variable is used in preference to the token found in the .userProfile file.
    Note: In a REST API call, the engine uses the token configured on the agent.
  • If you have copied the offline user token generated from Rational® Test Automation Server in the Rational® Integration Tester UI and the copied offline user token resides in the .userProfile file, then the test engine uses the offline token that is available in the .userProfile file. For more information, see Locating the used offline token.

Enabling tests to retrieve the configured secrets

Retrieving secrets during Tests running from command line, ANT CLI, Maven CLI, or as REST API calls provides the parameter or attributes that you may use to retrieve secrets when you are running tests from the command line, ANT CLI, or as REST API calls.

Table 1. Retrieving secrets during Tests running from command line, ANT CLI, Maven CLI, or as REST API calls
To retrieve secrets from Rational® Test Automation Server Parameter or attribute to use

When using the Rational® Integration Tester command line or Maven CLI

Use -secrets as a parameter in your command argument.

When you use the RunTests command with this parameter, the secrets collection name defined by the environment is overridden and the secrets defined in the project secrets collection on Rational® Test Automation Server is retrieved.

For details, see Run tests by using the command line.

When running as an ANT task

Use secrets as an attribute when you are defining an Ant task for running a test.

For details, see Run tests by using an Ant task.

Starting stubs

Retrieving secrets during Tests running from command line, ANT CLI, Maven CLI, or as REST API calls provides the parameter or attributes that you may use when you are starting stubs from the command line, ANT CLI, or as REST API calls.

When starting a stub from the Rational® Test Control Panel by using the start stub command, you may override the token that is used by the agent by specifying the token by using the parameter or attribute indicated in the following table.

Table 2. Starting stubs when running from command line, ANT, or as REST API calls
Starting a stub Parameter or attribute to use

When using the Rational® Integration Tester command line

Use --secretsAuthorization parameter in the start stub command.

For details, see Start a stub by using the command line.

When running as an ANT task

Use secretsAuthorization attribute in the start stub command.

For details, see Start a stub by using an Ant task.

When running as a REST API call

Use x-secrets-authorization header in the request.