TCL: invalid command name "else"

If you are used to traditional if-else and wrote "else" in separate line in TCL like below

if { ... } {
...
}
else {
...
}

You will get an error like me: invalid command name "else"

To get ride of this error, put the "else" and the "if" ending brackets in the same line

if { ... } {
...
} else {
...
}

.NET: Deserialize error while parsing the XML

I was running some Serialize and Deserialize code  online, on hackerrank , I was getting several XML parsing when calling Deserialize
The code I was using

string fileName = "file.txt";
System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer s =
    new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(typeof(myObject));

System.IO.StreamWriter sw = new System.IO.StreamWriter(fileName, true);
s.Serialize(sw, myObject);
sw.Close();

I was getting the below error

Unhandled Exception: System.Xml.XmlException: XML declaration cannot appear in this state

I did some search and found people talking about encoding problems, and I found some articles guiding to change the encoding, using XmlWriter instead of StreamWriter, I changed my code to below to see if this will impact my error.

System.Xml.XmlWriterSettings settings = new System.Xml.XmlWriterSettings();
settings.Encoding = new System.Text.UnicodeEncoding(false, false);
settings.Indent = true;

string fileName = "file.txt";
System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer s = new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(typeof(myObject));
System.Xml.XmlWriter xw = System.Xml.XmlWriter.Create(fileName, settings);
s.Serialize(xw, myObject);
xw.Close();

Error then changed, this gave me the below error

Unhandled Exception: System.Xml.XmlException: a name did not start with a legal character

Which means that the name was invalid, so I changed the encoding to be Ascii,  ASCIIEncoding

System.Xml.XmlWriterSettings settings = new System.Xml.XmlWriterSettings();
settings.Encoding = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();
settings.Indent = true;
System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer s = new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(typeof(mybject));
System.Xml.XmlWriter xw = System.Xml.XmlWriter.Create("filename", settings);
s.Serialize(xw, myObject);
file.Close();

The last code run successfully, and I was able to write and read the file

Selenium: Dealing with HTML loading modal panel

While playing back a test for a java rich faces application, the test was failing in the middle, debugging and playing back step by step, the test was passing with no issues. Looking more into the steps, there was a step that is causing ajax call, and after it there is a button click step, the one that was failing was the next one after the button click. When I checked the screen, there was a loading panel displayed during the ajax call, freezing all the screen, so I figured out that when this loading panel is displayed, selenium was able to find the button and click on it, but it is not actually clicked on the UI of the application, which cause that next step after to fail.

To resolve this, first I tried to look for something to make sure the button is clickable, I found something but for Java, and doesn’t exist for .NET

wait.until(elementToBeClickable(By.partialLinkText("SomeID")));

My test was on IE, and when I tried it with java, I had problems creating the selenium session with the selenium IE server.

Then I thought of something else, to identify any element change in the page that tells that the ajax call is done, then I can use this before the button click, to make sure it is clickable. I looked into the html page before, during and after the ajax call and compared. Before the call and when the loading panel was not visible, I found  hidden div with ID ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer, it looked like below

<div id="ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer" class="rich-modalpanel " style="position: absolute; z-index: 100; background-color: inherit; display: none;">

when the loading panel was visible, there was a div in the body like below (same as above, but the display style is gone)

<div id="ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer" class="rich-modalpanel " style="position: absolute; z-index: 100; background-color: inherit;">

After the ajax call, the loading panel disappears and it changes back to have “display:none”

<div id="ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer" class="rich-modalpanel " style="position: absolute; z-index: 100; background-color: inherit; display: none;">

I then created a function to wait for the ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer div to be displayed, then to wait until it is hidden again like below

public void WaitForModalPanel()
{
    string element_xpath = ".//*[@id='ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer'  and not(contains(@style,'display: none'))]";
    WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, new TimeSpan(0, 2, 0));
    wait.Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementIsVisible(By.XPath(element_xpath)));
    element_xpath = ".//*[@id='ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer' and contains(@style,'DISPLAY: none')]";
    wait.Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementExists(By.XPath(element_xpath)));
}

Calling the above function before the button click, the button click was also clicked on the UI and the test was passing successfully

Selenium: unable to locate element using style attribute with internet explorer

While developing a selenium test and running it on IE,  I was trying to locate an element on the page with xpath, selenium couldn’t find the element, I was getting exception: “NoSuchElementException: Unable to find element with xpath == ……”

I thought at the beginning that there is something wrong with my xpath string, and I kept looking into this for a while. I have installed FirePath plugin for Firefox to verify my xpath, and my xpath was working find, xpath could locate element

Finally I spotted something on selenium documentation under section “IE and Style Attributes” that says that if you are trying to locate an element with the style attribute, it might not work in internet explorer as IE interpret the style parameters in upper case differently that other browsers, so locating with style and lowercase will success in Firefox, Chrome, etc… but will fail in IE

looking back to my xpath, my element xpath was ".//*[@id='ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer' and contains(@style,'display: none')]"

Changing it to ".//*[@id='ajaxLoadingModalPanelContainer' and contains(@style,DISPLAY: none')]" my test was able to find the element successfully

C#: Inserting duplicates into sorted List

I wanted to have a sorted list, with the ability to have items duplicate, built in sorted collections doesn’t allow duplicate values, so I used a List, and for effeciancy, I maintained the items sorted in it while insertion, instead of calling the sort method with each insertion
To insert in the list sorted, I used the binary search method, to find the first item less then or equal to the inserted item

Suppose we have a sorted list “list”, and we want to insert item i keeping it sorted

    List<int> list= new List<int>();

    int index = list.BinarySearch(i);
    if (index < 0)
       list.Insert(~index, i);
    else
       list.Insert(index, i);

Another way of having sorted list with duplicates is to use a normal sorted list and a custom comparer

    public class DuplicateKeyComparer<TKey>:IComparer<TKey> where TKey : IComparable
    {
        public int Compare(TKey x, TKey y)
        {
            int result = x.CompareTo(y);

            if (result == 0)
                return 1;   // Handle equality as being greater
            return result;
        }
    }

Only draw back of this method is that we can't find elements or remove, we can only iterate over them, as using the above comparer would always return 1 and won't match any elements.

Running Selenium tests from Visual Studio – Step by step

From Firefox, record new selenium test, for example for Google search

Export the test to C# web drive

This is how it looks like after export

Open visual studio, create new test project

By default the file UnitTest1.cs is created

Create a new cs file, name it for example GoogleSearch

Copy the code from the cs file generated by selenium and paste it in the file GoogleSearch.cs

Add reference in the project to Selenium .Net WebDriver, WebDriver.dll and WebDriver.Support.dl

Now the references added, you can see that the editor recognizes the selenium name spaces

using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Firefox;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI;

Find and replace “TestFixture” to “TestClass”, “SetUp” to “TestInitialize()”, “Test” to “TestMethod”, “TearDown” to “TestCleanup()”

To run with Chrome, download chromedriver.exe from https://code.google.com/p/chromedriver/downloads/list, place it in the bin folder

Change the driver in the code to Chrome then run the test

driver = new OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome.ChromeDriver();

Running the test, chrome will open, and Google search page will be displayed, displaying search results then closed

This was a step by step example on running selenium test from visual studio

jmeter: preparing data or recycling data with JDBC PreProcessor or JDBC PostProcessor

I was doing testing on some records, and to be able to run the test again, the status of the record must be set to specific value

To be able to do that, I thought of doing this by trigger on the DB, but unfortunately, I was working on the client DB and I didn’t have access to create triggers

So I thought of doing that from jmeter, and it worked perfectly

First I added JDBC Connection Configuration as in the image below

Configured this as below

Variable Name: conn

(Variable name should be any name, that will be used later)

Database URL: jdbc:db2://127.0.0.1:50000/QAT_MOI_DB1T;

(Database URL is the JDBC URL for the database)

JDBC Driver class: com.ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver

(Make sure to place the drivers in the lib directory inside jmeter directory. you will need to restart your jmeter to for them to work correctly, in my case I was working with DB2 database, so I copied the files db2jcc.jar and db2jcc_license_cisuz.jar to the lib directory)

Username: user

Password: password

Then I added JDBC PostProcessor at the first request in the script

Configured it,

Variable Name: conn

(variable name is same as above in the configuration element)

Query Type: update statement

Query: update records set status=1 where id=${id};

I was able to insert parameters in the query same way I do in the requests

By this way I was able to reset the data before every cycle

You can also add JDBC PostProcessor at the last request, to do some other post processing

jmeter with spring webflow

I have been using jmeter for a while with spring webflow application, I have some experience with it now that I would to share

Studying the recording of spring webflow application, I noticed the following

There are requests that doesn’t have anything inside, that are followed by requests with execution parameter as in the images below

Request without any parameters, let’s call them initial requests

Request with the “execution” parameter, let’s call them execution requests

Or it could be request with execution parameter in the query string, and the view state parameter, execution in query requests

To be able to replay the scenario,  with multiple iterations, and multiple users, the execution parameters and view state needs to be parameterized, to be extracted and used in next requests to maintain the execution flow correctly

I found out by trials and from the results from the results tree, that initial requests are followed by sub samples that contains the execution parameter for the consequences request

Also found out that new execution is generated at the end of execution in query requests

But there was a difference in the extraction of the execution parameter in that case, it comes in the body

So for my scenario, in order to work correctly, I added 2 types of extraction rules

One after initial requests, that checks the sub sample URL only with the below settings

Apply To: Sub-samples only

Response Field to Check: URL

Regular Expression: execution=(.+?)$

Another one at the end of each request with execution in the query string, with the below settings

Apply To: Main sample only

Response Field to Check: Body

Regular Expression: execution=([^"]+)"

Then in consecutive requests, replace the execution parameter with the extracted parameter, in my case here I named it ${e3s2}

Method not found exception with WCF

I had a WCF client for a web service, it was working fine from my machine, when I deployed my application to other machines, I was getting the below exception

System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: 'Void System.ServiceModel.Channels.SecurityBindingElement.set_AllowInsecureTransport(Boolean)'.

When I searched online I found out that this could happen when .NET framework is not installed. I tried installing .NET framework 3.5 SP1 on these machines, but it was always failing since this machines OS is windows 7, and I was getting error that I should use “Turn windows features on or off” to install .NET framework 3.5, which was already installed by this way

I searched more, and I found out that there is hot fix for WCF that adds AllowInsecureTransport  property to the SecurityBindingElement class, and i was using this on my WCF client

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcfprerelease/thread/c12cf16f-20b9-4204-b05c-342fc33d0727/

I found couple of updates for .NET framework 3.5 SP1, non of them installed successfully, there were errors in setup, either product not found, or things like this

Finally I found one that I was able to install from the link below

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976462/en-us

I downloaded the x86 file Windows6.1-KB976462-v2-x86.msu from https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806 , installed it on the machines, then the application worked without any exceptions

Changing DB2 codepage

While executing sql command in IBM db2 control center editor, I was getting error

SQL0332N Character conversion from the source code page "" to the target code page "" is not supported. SQLSTATE=57017

Searching for this, I found that I need t change the code page of the client to be the same as the table I am selecting from

To do this:

Open a command prompt

Go to C:\Program Files\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN\ or just make sure it exists in the windows %PATH%

Type db2set db2codepage=1208 then press enter

In my case the target codepage was 1208, it needs to be checked first before setting it