Defining Flow Process Test Types

Once you have defined your process you must now define it as a test type. Go to the Data Catalogue and click on ‘New Test Criteria’.

Details and Criteria

Each Tab needs to be set. Firstly, set the execution type to Flow, then click Criteria:

Select your Process:

The unique Data Identifier is used, along with the keys, to enforce the allocation of unique values to different tests. See the section ‘Core Concepts, Test Data Allocation Pools’.

In the description, enter a relevant and easily identifiable description of the test type.

Data

Default How Many: Enter how many values you wish to return; this defaults to 1. You can request to have multiple values, for example, I can request to get 10 orders for a specific customer. This value can be overridden for specific test cases, the default is set when you create a new Test in an allocation pool.

Default Unique: This will be the default for the allocated pool test case, it can be overridden. Setting this means that any retrieved values will not be used by any others tests within the allocation pool.

Use to Make Data if no data found: This allows you to invoke a VIP flow if the allocated test returns no data. This feature means that if no data exists you can run ANY process you like to create the data. This is especially useful for automated testing whereby you would normally have to skip the test if there was no appropriate data.

N.B.  The input parameters of the VIP flow must be in the same order as the input parameters of the Find Test.

Keys

Click on New Key to enter the output columns:

The ID is the single returned value from the Flow.

This Key along with the Data Identifier identifies if this value is being used in other tests.

Parameters

The parameters tab will already have the input parameters defined. You can see that par1 has carried over, even though it has a defined value. If you DO NOT want to override this, you can delete that parameter.

You can also rename the parameters to be more meaningful:

Click on Save once you have filled in all the tabs.

Create a simple manual test in an allocation pool and run the test to make sure the Flow is being called correctly. See the section Running The Test Data Allocation.