Oracle performance

Creating a script

In this section you will learn how to create a script. Make sure that the Forms application link points to the correct location (see Preparing to use Forms2test)

Start recording

Choose Start > Programs > Forms2test 4.1 > Forms2test 4.1 to launch Forms2test.

Select the Design tab(1) and click New(2) at the bottom right.



Two dialog boxes open, the 'Open browser' dialog and the recording control panel. The 'Open browser' dialog box shows the link for accessing the Oracle Forms application. Note that this link differs from the original link. The link refers to the local listening port of Forms2test instead of the application server (see How Forms2test works).



You can copy the link to the clipboard and paste the link into your favorite browser clicking Copy or you can open the link directly in the Internet Explorer clicking Open. Note that even when the Forms application runs over https, the Forms2test link uses the unsecure http protocol.

Either way, the dialog box will disappear and Forms2test starts recording when the web browser opens.

The recording control panel shows some network statistics (total number of network requests send to the server and the cumulative response time) and the controls to define a transaction and add think times.



Although the recording session will automatically close when you exit your Forms application you can always manually stop/cancel the recording session by pressing the Stop button.

Defining a transaction

During recording a user session you can define specific series of application steps within a business process of interest. For instance logging on to the database, opening a form or processing an order. With Forms2test you can designate a series of user steps you want to measure under load by defining them as a logical transaction. When playing back the user session Forms2test will capture the following performance statistics for each transaction:

• Average response time of the transaction in milliseconds,
• Minimum response time of the transaction in milliseconds, and the
• Maximum response time of the transaction in milliseconds.

For each transaction Forms2test will automatically generate a graphical report based on the statistics mentioned.

For example, the transaction report below shows that the minimum response time of the transaction during the test was 1400 milliseconds. Which is equal to the baseline response time. And the maximum response time was 2000 milliseconds. The average response time of the transaction was about 1500 milliseconds.



Defining the beginning of a transaction is easy. While recording a user session, (1) enter the name of the transaction in the record control panel and (2) click “Begin” to define the beginning of the transaction.



Then, continue with the Forms application till the end of the transaction. To define the end of the transaction, navigate to the record control panel and click “End” to define the end of the transaction.

Defining think time

During recording a user session you can define points to suspend execution. Also known as “think time”. When playing back the user session Forms2test will wait for the given number of seconds at the defined think time before continuing.

To define think times, enter the number of seconds to cease execution (1) and click Add (2) in the recording control panel.



After recording the script you can adjust the think time with the Script Editor. It’s also possible to define random think time within a predefined range with the Script Editor.

Defining an iteration

An iteration is a mechanism to iterate over a series of session steps by marking them as a single logical step. For instance entering a claim or altering a customer. At most one iteration can be defined in a recording session. While playing back the recorded session you can define how many times the iteration should be repeated and the idle time between two consecutive iterations (in seconds). For instance, six repetitions with an idle time of 10 minutes.

Defining the beginning of an iteration is simple. While recording a user session, click iteration Begin in the recording control panel.



Likewise, to define the end of the iteration, click iteration End. Make sure that the (GUI) state of the Forms application is exactly the same at the beginning of the iteration as at the end of the iteration!



Warning: Iteration for Oracle Forms are very error prune and sometimes not applicable. That differs per Forms application. The generated network traffic of the iteration has to be absolutely idempotent. That is, the generated network traffic has to be the same for each repetition. Therefore, the state of the Forms applications at the beginning of an iteration should be exactly the same at the end of the transaction. The best way to find out whether an iteration is applicable is to playback the script with and without repetitions. If the script passes without repetitions and fails with repetitions then iterations can most probably not be used for that particular user session.

Ending and saving a recording session

After recording the business process, you end the recording session by closing the Oracle Forms application normally. Forms2test will recognize this event and provide you with a dialog to save the recorded session to the file system.

Warning: When the Forms application has a trigger defined to load a HTML page on closing the application to close the browser window using Javascript, the Forms application will in fact terminate abnormally. As a consequence, Forms2test will not receive the application exit event and not provide the user with the save dialog. Although this way of closing the Forms application is end user friendly, another undesired consequence is that the Forms runtime will stay resident until a timeout occurs (default 15 minutes).