Creating and Defining VIP Flows to Find and Make Data for use by Test Data Allocation

See the documentation on using VIP to understand how to create and maintain flows. It is assumed you have some knowledge on how to create VIP flows.

VIP has many powerful connectors that provide direct connectivity to many products. Most products have an API layer and it is easy to add these APIs to VIP.

VIP can also call any existing scripts you have to find or make data. It is very common to have command line scripts written in Perl or PowerShell that perform useful data lookups or can make data to support testing.

There is an example in ‘c:\viptdm\dataallocation’ :

Open the flow and look at how the command script is invoked. This flow can be added into Modeller and called from the Test Data Allocation process.

In addition, VIP has a powerful set of Test Data Management utilities that can generate, mask, copy and clone data directly into databases, flat files or data queues.

For the flows to work inside the Modeller Data Allocation Framework the VIP flows must have two parameters defined:

1. parRC, set it to -1 if there is a failure and 0 if it works correctly
2. parReturn whatever you set it to will be returned into the Test Data Allocation as the result.

These parameters are defined in the example below:

Any input parameters you wish to override will be defined in Modeller, see Defining VIP Flows inside Test Modeller. Any output data you wish to return must be return in a list of strings.

Once you have defined your flow and moved it to the server it will be running on you need to define the process in Test Modeller.

You can do this manually or directly from inside VIP itself, this will be covered in the next section.

Example

Next, open the flow ‘VIPTestGetData.VIP’. This is an example flow you can add into your processes and can be called for Data Allocation.

Open the flow and click execute – you can see it returns a list of 10 rows. This data is being put into the Output parameter ParListOfData.

Set par1 to “1” and rerun, you will see it returns only 1 result. Reset par1 to “2” and check the results.