General Question : Why do so many SoapUI users appear to use Groovy scripts to run tests?

Thank you for posting to our Community Forum.

In my experience as a Support Engineer, users resort to mainly scripting for two reasons:

1. Scripting gives them greater control of their testing which is needed for their project requirements
2. They have alot of coding experience and prefer using a series of scripts.

ReadyAPI provide this flexibility to users so that you can choose how you want to construct your tests. One way isn't inherently better than the other.

I am interested in hearing from other users who have decided to use mainly groovy scripting in ReadyAPI since this choice is really on a case by case basis depending on experience and projects.

Have a great day!

I various reasons for using Groovy. In one case I needed to make a system call to run a bash script then format the standard output and feed the output into the value part of a json object for the request.

In another case I needed to read in a response value from the previous step and put that value in a json object for another request. 

And then I had some json requirement that had two words (blank space) in some name fields. I needed to work with Groovy to get that going.

I use Groovy in the assertion script to check for a specific value in our case "Success"

I also use Groovy at the test suite level Setup Script to set the SSL keystone password and keystone location.

ChrisA,

I feel that you know well when do you need to use the Groovy Script test step and other have also provided when do they use it.

I would like to add my 2 cents answering / clarifying your question.

• It all depends on the need and do not think that you are not using it(running tests from groovy script step) or missing something.
• Some people use it because of their use case or situation. It does not mean, every body needs to use it in the same way.
• Some people use it though it is not required just because they see some code some where or use it incorrectly / inappropriately. The example link you pointed is correct example for this kind. If you look at answers, 3rd one is mine (luckily happen to be there for the cited example) where it is possible to achieve the same thing (as author of the question wanted) with much lesser code and without needing to run the test step (which your main point in the question) as part of Script Assertion(that means without even needing to have an additional Groovy Script test step).
• Some people run a project or test suite from a groovy script test step of different project and that is not the right way to use it.
• The tool can be used to design your tests and try them. Once the project is ready, use the SOAPUI_HOME/bin/testrunner.bat (.sh) to execute the project from command line.
• Some people have dependency between the projects or suites which is again not the right way. I believe that each test should be independent.

"For loop" gets very easy to use with groovy. As I find conditional goto and datasource loop a bit confusing.

Date/data manipulation is also possible with groovy

Thats only when I use it.

I think many answers are misunderstanding your question as I understand it.
I read your question as why are users using Groovy to run test cases.
I'm aware of two situations, one is to use a previous test case as a setup for the current test case. The second is using a test case as a library call - this is when the library procedure needs to make a HTTP  request to the system under test and these requests are not done via Groovy.