Chapter 7. Advanced Features

There are still more advanced features of JMeter than those we are familiar with. Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 have provided essential tools to build Test Plans that support Performance Testing and Functional Testing, respectively. This chapter will take us further into how we can enhance a basic Test Plan by using Regular Expressions and built-in Functions as supported by JMeter. This chapter will also introduce the Regular Expression Extractor, which I personally find very useful as it makes a Test Plan more practical than it is without the Extractor. Naturally, this chapter will give you a 'live' walkthrough of these features. In addition, since JMeter works on the protocol level, not only can we use it to test web applications, but also on many other Internet applications, such as FTP, LDAP, Databases, etc. Very little has been said about these other features, as web applications testing has been the dominant area of JMeter usage.

Although this chapter may not go into greater detail, it provides you with a more 'live' example on how these features can be used. We will use three Test Plans to demonstrate these features of JMeter: Web Test Plan, Database Test Plan, and FTP Test Plan. While 'Web Test Plan' tests a remote HTTP server, 'Database Test Plan' allow us to perform tests on a remote database server. Of course, 'FTP Test Plan' is used to perform tests on any remote File or FTP Server. The first section Extending the Web Test Plan will be based on a simple web application I have created for this book, while in the section Testing a Database Server will simply extract information from the same database that the web application is using, though using a different database schema. In Testing an FTP server, the FTP Test Plan will require a 'live' file server. For this chapter, we will use the localhost as the target 'web server', 'Database Server', and 'FTP Server'.