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Rational® Performance Tester
Test Execution Specialist Guide
This guide describes tasks that you can perform on schedules, test execution with custom code, and Extending Rational® Performance Tester to support other protocols. This guide is intended for testers or test execution specialists.
Extending Rational® Performance Tester to support other protocols
The Rational® Performance Tester Extensibility Software Development Kit (SDK) enables you to create extensions to support testing new protocols without modifying the core product code. You can create an extension that provides functionality for testing other protocols in addition to the HTTP protocol support that is standard in Rational Performance Tester.
Protocol extension structure
Before organizing your extension, note the restrictions and guidelines provided in this topic.

Rational® Performance Tester
- Release Notes
  This document contains information about what's new, installation instructions, known issues in IBM® Rational® Performance Tester, and contact information of IBM Customer Support.
- System Requirements
  This document includes information about hardware and software requirements for IBM® Rational® Performance Tester.
- Getting Started
  This guide provides an overview and describes the task flows to get you started with Rational® Performance Tester. This guide is intended for new users.
- Tutorials
  This section contains the tutorials which explains the main features of Rational® Performance Tester.
- Samples
  This section describes about the sample project which can be used with Rational® Performance Tester to test the functionality of an application.
- Administrator Guide
  This guide describes how to install Rational® Performance Tester. After you install the product, you can perform administration tasks such as license configuration and integration with other products. This guide is intended for administrators.
- Test Author Guide
  This guide describes how to create test scripts in Rational® Performance Tester and enhances tests by applying different test elements such as dataset, variables, and verification points. This guide is intended for testers.
- Test Execution Specialist Guide
  This guide describes tasks that you can perform on schedules, test execution with custom code, and Extending Rational® Performance Tester to support other protocols. This guide is intended for testers or test execution specialists.
  - Running schedules with performance testing
    After you have added the user groups, tests, and other items to a schedule, and you are satisfied that it represents a realistic workload, you run the schedule.
  - Extending test execution with custom code
    You can extend how you run your tests by writing custom Java™ code and calling the code from the test. You can also specify that results from the tests that are affected by your custom code be included in reports.
  - Extending Rational® Performance Tester to support other protocols
    The Rational® Performance Tester Extensibility Software Development Kit (SDK) enables you to create extensions to support testing new protocols without modifying the core product code. You can create an extension that provides functionality for testing other protocols in addition to the HTTP protocol support that is standard in Rational Performance Tester.
    - Protocol extension structure
      Before organizing your extension, note the restrictions and guidelines provided in this topic.
    - Extending the test recorder
      To generate a test, the data exchanged by an application and another entity such as a server must be recorded. The recorded data is then processed to generate a test.
    - Extending the test generation framework
      Test generation consists of processing the recorded data and producing a test.
    - Contributing annotations
      An annotation is an action that a user performs during a recording session. Annotations are used to document or structure the test generated from the recording.
    - Extending the load test behavior model
      The load test behavior model (LTBM) is a model of the behavior of a performance test in Rational® Performance Tester.
    - Extending data correlation
      Data correlation is the process of extracting data that is returned from a server, and then sending it back to the server in a subsequent request.
    - Extending the test editor
      The performance testing software provides application programming interface (API) classes for extending the test and performance tools platform (TPTP) to write new editors and protocol extensions.
    - Contributing error handlers
      An error handler is associated with an error condition. Error handlers specify the action to take when a specified error condition occurs. Error handlers are provided for conditions such as verification-point failures, connection failures, server timeouts, and data-correlation problems. You can add new types of errors and error handlers.
    - Extending the schedule component
      When you extend the schedule component in performance testing, another plug-in can contribute options to a schedule. Those options can be set up to persist in the schedule model, and a corresponding user interface can be displayed for editing the new options.
    - Extending code generation
      The code generation subsystem maps Load Test Behavior Model (LTBM) elements to objects of the code generation element model (IModelElement), which in turn are mapped to objects of its ILanguageElement class. As a result, a language element tree is created that contains all equivalent elements of the behavior model test element tree and at the same time determines the structure of code to be generated.
    - Extending the run-time environment
      The run-time environment defines the plug-ins on which all other plug-ins depend. The run-time environment is responsible for defining a structure for plug-ins and the implementation detail behind them.
    - Extending the test log viewer
      After running a test, the test results are saved in a test log. Use the Test Log viewer to check the results for specific events, such as the script start and end, loop, invocation, message, or verdict.
    - Extending evaluation results
      Reports are a specification of how performance test data should be extracted from the statistical model and presented to the user.
- Test Manager Guide
  This guide describes how to keep track of the performance of the application by evaluating the test results. This guide is intended for test managers.
- Troubleshooting Guide
  This guide describes how to analyze and resolve some of the common problems that you might encounter while you work with Rational® Performance Tester.
- Reference Guide
  This guide describes, additional topics to gain more knowledge about Rational® Performance Tester.
- All Guides (PDFs)
  You can find the link to view or download the content of the release notes, system requirements, and persona guides of Rational® Performance Tester as a PDF file.
- Security Considerations
  You can take certain actions to ensure that your installation is secure, customize your security settings, and set up user access controls.
- Notices
  This document provides information about copyright, trademarks, terms and conditions for the product documentation.

Protocol extension structure

Before organizing your extension, note the restrictions and guidelines provided in this topic.

Restrictions

The following restrictions apply to plug-ins:

The execution portion of the plug-in must be deployed to an agent. You cannot assume that the Software Development Workbench is available.
The execution portion of the plug-in code cannot depend on any workbench code.
The execution portion of the code cannot depend on the workspace because none is available on the agent.

For best results, minimize the amount of code that is deployed to the agent for execution.

Guidelines for naming plug-ins

Most base Rational® Performance Tester plug-ins follow this naming convention:

<prefix>.<component>[.subcomponent].<protocol>

where:

prefix: The prefix com.ibm.rational.test.lt is used for all load-test-specific Rational® Performance Tester plug-ins.
component: One of the extension components:testgen, datacorrelation, testeditor, codegen, execution, or models.
subcomponent: Some plug-ins contain subcomponents (for example, execution.ui contains the UI portion of execution), or they might have separate code based on their use in a different component (for example, datacorrelation.testgen and datacorrelation.execution).
protocol: For example, http, or sap. (Some plug-ins use core for the base plug-in.)

Using these conventions, the extension can have the following plug-ins:

com.ibm.rational.test.lt.recorder.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.testgen.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.models.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.testeditor.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.sdksamples.datacorrelation.testgen.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.sdksamples.datacorrelation.execution.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.codegen.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.execution.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.execution.results.protocol

Alternatively, you can divide the code into two plug-ins, one for the workbench and one for execution. This has the advantage of deploying fewer plug-ins. For an example, refer to the Siebel extension to Performance Tester.

Using this method, you would have the following two plug-ins:

com.ibm.rational.test.lt.protocol
com.ibm.rational.test.lt.protocol.execution

Within these plug-ins, you can either arrange the components in one of two ways:

As separate source folders
As separate packages within a single source folder