View Only

The 12 days of 8.0 – Day 2

By Anon Anon posted Dec 02, 2014 06:04 AM

Recommend

"On the second day of 8.0 the CA Team gave to me…

Two RR pairs added,

and a Server-Side recorder in a DevTest Tree"

(sung to the tune of the 12 days of Christmas)

Here we are at day 2 in our 12 days of DevTest blog series and I’m excited to share with you the highlights of our new virtual service editor in the CA Service Virtualization 8.0 DevTest Portal.

We’ve been told many times before that editing a virtual service in the good ol’ “LISA Workstation” was not for the faint of heart. Alas, we’ve reinvented editing addressing the key feedback points from YOU our users.

Since the blog is supposed to be focused on “Two RR pairs added”, let me start with that new feature and then move down the line on the rest of the amazingness in the new editor.

Two RR Pairs Added: Imagine, you just finished recording a virtual service and realized that the live service you recorded doesn’t have everything you need in that service image. What to do? Re-record is annoying and attempting to manually add the signature is painful. Alas, we have a resolution – a simple plus sign allowing you to add Request/Response pairs by selecting or dragging and dropping the .xml or .txt files into the “add” window. Talk about simplicity.
View Data on One Screen: Now what if you need to do a bit more with that service image. Perhaps view the list of stateless transactions (signatures) and the request data (arguments and specifics) and response data in one screen? Well in this new DevTest Portal, you can do just that. No more scrolling pain or expanding windows that show ½ of what you need. Now the key information on the requests and responses that are a part of your service image is available to you with a click of a button.
Conversation View: Although only a small set of virtual services are stateful, we felt it necessary to continue to share the tree/conversation view of transactions so that you can visualize dependencies as well as specific request and response data all in a single screen. In addition, the ability to zoom into the conversation view or scroll around with the ‘finder’ helps with navigating large stateful virtual services.
Reorder Signatures, Arguments and Specifics: Now we’re getting to the meat of the service image – choosing the order in which requests are matched and responses are selected. With the easy to use multi-select, drag and drop functionality you can move groups of Signatures, Arguments or Specifics with a few clicks. There are also nifty arrows to have you move items a few places along the scrollable list. Now it’s easy to add more combinations to your virtual service to handle expanded coverage when in the testing phase of your application development. All of this in a web-based user interface; It’s stunning.
Open multiple service images from different projects: Sometimes features come as a side effect of good design. The request to view the details of virtual services from multiple projects at once has come from many of our users. It’s highly voted in our community as well. Well with the new user interface in the DevTest Portal, you can select a project, select a virtual service, view its details and without closing it select another project, select a virtual service and view its details. Now you can continue to use projects to delineate releases or teams but still enable assets from those projects to be viewed or worked on at the same time by the same user.
Searching with auto-fill and automatic drill into data found: Now we’re into the brains of the operation. One of the clear pain points of editing a virtual service is having to transverse through each specific transaction to find the area you want to edit. The solution? Search. But not just any search – smart search that automatically fills in suggested text as you begin typing based on the data it has indexed in your service image. Intuitive search that automatically brings you to the specific content you were looking for and highlights the text so it’s clearly visible to the human eye. This isn’t just search, this is a game changer for those of you that need the ability to add business rules to your virtual service responses, create negative test scenarios from current, positive data or simply just find where a specific address is being referenced in a robust service image. (and yes, this works for conversations too)
Searchable Notes and Annotations: Another highly requested feature by our users, (here and here) the ability to add notes and/or annotations to your transactions, service image and even to the specific requests. Folks have told us that they want to annotate a service image before handing it over to another team, so that transactions and specifics are clearly identified leaving less to human interpretation. Maybe you want to identify a specific use case/test case, negative test scenario or a manually entered request or response. You can now do so by adding a note to your Transaction or even editing the name of a Specific Request. (No worries, we preserve the original name in case you ever need to see the operation name.)
Find a Match by Request: When asked why users need to edit a virtual service, over 75% of you stated that you want to see how the virtual service will respond to a specific request. Well, the solution to this challenge all begins with your ability to search through the service image to find the information you need in a few clicks. With 8.0, you can paste request text or drag a request file into the ‘Find a Match by Request’ feature and swiftly find the match without the hassle of going over independent matching criteria.
Progressive Save: Same as in the server-side recorder, all changes you make in this editor are saved automatically to the service image. No need to click “save” before you go to lunch. We’ll take care of that for you.

There are other hidden gems in this new virtual service editor, like

The confusing term “meta” has been changed to “default” to make it very clear which specific is the default or final match.
Some of the clearly advanced user features are hidden behind the advanced user interface toggle switch. This keeps the UI clean for newer users but still gives our experienced users all the features they need.
Ability to format your response data to a more readable view as well as search within a specific response to get to the line you are looking for.
A right-click menu added to the “Manage” left navigation enabling you to (1) Easily deploy a virtual service, (2) Easily download an archive of the virtual service (MAR) for sharing outside of your team or (3) Delete that virtual service
Ability to link to a service image for sharing with your team. Just grab the URL in your browsers address bar and send it to a friend.

Well that was a huge update and I’m still not sure if I captured all the greatness of this new Virtual Service Editor. So much for just “Two RR Pairs Added”.

Check out this quick video to see our second 8.0 gift to you.