How to matching request to response

Discussion created by ShanaR on Mar 20, 2015
Latest reply on Apr 9, 2015 by ShanaR

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I'm new to CA LISA and working on my first VS. My VS will consume a request via a HTTP POST and I'd like to match a piece of information from the body of the request message to the appropriate response message to return back. I've created the VSI/VSM using a request/response pair and am extracting the match data from the transaction.body of the incoming request. But I'm not sure how to match to the response. I've tried adding a Compare Strings for Response Lookup step using the Find in String comparison but it finds no match even though the string of data exists in at least one of the responses. I have the Compare String step after the VS Execution Router in the VSM. Is this the correct way to go about matching the request to the response?

Thanks in advance!

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Stefana_Muller Mar 24, 2015 3:40 PM
I'm missing what you are doing here. To map a specific request to a response, open VSI in the DevTest Portal (see below picture of a sample):
Now, find your signature (request) in the left column under "stateless signatures". Then under Specifics - find the specific request you need to match with a response. Here I'm showing 2 specifics "getNewToken" user name=admin, password=admin. The other specific is hidden but showing as "3 getNewToken". If i click on it, it will expand and show an different user name and password combination.

Back to editing the specific. Once you have the Specific correct - then edit the response to what you want it to be (under Response Data or the right column above).

Let me know if that helps - I can do a quick demo for you if you need as well.
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- ShanaR @ Stefana_Muller on Mar 24, 2015 5:35 PM
  Thank you Stefana. I think in your example you are returning a different response based on the parameters username and password? In my scenario, my request has no specific parameters. Only a payload of data (XML) coming in the request body and buried in the payload is a specific ID. I’d like to dynamically return a different response based on the ID coming through in the payload. So if the payload contains ID 123, return back a response with data for ID 123. If the payload contains ID 456, then I would return a different response message. I’m not sure how to tie that piece of data (the ID) with the corresponding response.
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  - Rick.Brown @ ShanaR on Mar 24, 2015 6:43 PM
    In the screenshot example, the username and password arguments were automatically extracted from the payload. This is done automatically in CA Service Virtualization (AKA LISA) for all known protocols. During the generation wizard, the request is parsed to see if it can be understood, and the appropriate Data Protocol Handler is selected.
    
    In your instance, it looks like this step has been skipped or failed. Fortunately, the generation wizard allows the user to add any data protocols to allow the request to be understood and parameters to be extracted from it.
    
    You mention "LISA" and "HTTP POST". Am I to assume it's not the current shipping version, and you're using REST messages? If you're on a version of LISA a few years old, you will need an upgrade to understand some of the nuances of what you will see in REST. If you're using a fairly current version (with REST support), the generation wizard might have identified REST and not bothered to scan inside the request for the XML block, in which case you can simply add XML to the list of data protocols in that step of the wizard.
    
    Rick
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  - Stefana_Muller @ ShanaR on Mar 25, 2015 6:10 PM
    In addition to what Rick has shared - you can use have the ID in the request be a magic string (or variable). Once you apply the DPH and arguments like the "ID" can be seen in the blob you can find the argument in the VSI editor, find the ID in the response (it should automatically be detected as a magic string, if not you can manually create it) and then the correlation is there.
    
    Here's some additional info on magic strings:
    Magic Strings - DevTest Solutions - 8.0.1 - CA Wiki
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    - ShanaR @ Stefana_Muller on Apr 6, 2015 6:22 PM
      Thank you Stefana and Rick for your responses to my question. I was able to find some time to work on this over the last couple of days and made a little bit of progress in using the VS Recorder to record my requests coming in and the corresponding response to go along with each request. I can see that the recorded request payload stored in the recorded_raw_request attribute for each specific transaction. Is the only way for the incoming request to match to the specific request is to match on the entire payload? My service has no argument to identify the transaction, so I want to match a specific value within an xml tag like <idValue>12345</idValue> in the incoming request to the specific request in LISA that also contains that xml string. Is this the correct way to go about this?
      
      Thanks!
      Shana
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      - Rick.Brown @ ShanaR on Apr 8, 2015 10:17 AM
        Hi Shana --
        
        The request tags should be automatically converted to parameters if the correct data protocol(s) have been selected in the generation wizard. The does not seem to be happening in your case. Are you able to share your generated virtual service, and message samples or a raw traffic file (select a new file in the "Export to" edit box at the start of the generation wizard to create a raw traffic file), so I would be able to check the data protocols that should be being used? It could be as simple as needing to add an XML payload parser to your list of request data protocols.
        
        You can send me a private message, or an email.
        
        Thanks
        
        Rick
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        ShanaR @ Rick.Brown on Apr 9, 2015 1:49 PM
        Thank you Rick! Adding the XML parser was the key piece I was missing. I was able to parse the request data and using the xpath query find the piece of data to match on.
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How to matching request to response

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