Forum Discussion

jonrey's avatar
jonrey
Occasional Contributor
10 years ago

Random Date Project Property

Hello all!   I'm hoping that somebody can help me with this request - I'm a complete novice at this type of coding.  I need to create a Project Property variable to randomize a date in my Soap Requ...
  • rupert_anderson's avatar
    rupert_anderson
    10 years ago

    Hi,

    You're welcome, happy to help! :-)

    I'm not sure, but think the 00:00:00 is the HH:MM:SS part of the XML DateTime datatype e.g.

     

    <startdate>2002-05-30T09:00:00</startdate>

    see http://www.w3schools.com/schema/schema_dtypes_date.asp

     

    Are you using a SOAP or XML request with that data type? If so, it will probably force your date to include the time portion.

     

    Cheers,

    Rup

  • rupert_anderson's avatar
    rupert_anderson
    10 years ago

    Hi,

     

    Don't worry, I'm happy to help and wondered if you might also want to know how to use the script inline as a property expansion, as its more of a mouthful than the first expression was!

     

    I think the short answer is (use semicolons to separate the statements when using inline):

     

    ${=def now = new Date().parse("yy-MM-dd", "14-06-01");now.month = 6 + new Random().nextInt(18);now.format("yy-MM-dd")}

     

    But, personally, especially for larger scripts I don't do this as it isn't very readable. Instead I would simply add a Groovy TestStep before your Test Request TestStep and then add the result to a property on the (TestCase) 'context' e.g.

     

    def now = new Date().parse("yy-MM-dd", "14-06-01")
    now.month = 6 + new Random().nextInt(18)
    context["randomDate"] = now.format("yy-MM-dd")

     

    Then in the Test Request TestStep, all you need to reference and insert the value is:

     

    ${=randomDate}

     

    (this method may serve you better in the future)

     

    Make sense?

     

    Cheers,

    Rup

rupert_anderson's avatar
rupert_anderson
Valued Contributor

Hi,

 

Well, there are probably a few ways to do this, here is one for your to try:

 

//To get either 2014 or 2015, I started with 2014 and added either 0 or 1 (randomly generated) to it.

def randomYear = new Random().nextInt(2)+2014

 

//To get a 0 padded month between 01 and 12, I generate an integer between 1 and 12.

def randomMonth = String.valueOf(new Random().nextInt(12)+1)

 

//Then finally combine the parts, whilst padding the month (as a String) to 2 digits. 
log.info randomYear + '-' + randomMonth.padLeft( 2, '0' ) + '-01'

 

To get this in a one liner:

 

log.info new Random().nextInt(2)+2014 + '-' + String.valueOf(new Random().nextInt(12)+1).padLeft( 2, '0' ) + '-01'

 

prints

  • Thu May 21 19:57:40 UTC 2015:INFO:2014-06-01

or as a property expansion like you had:

 

${=new Random().nextInt(2)+2014 + '-' + String.valueOf(new Random().nextInt(12)+1).padLeft( 2, '0' ) + '-01'}

 

Does this do what you want?

 

Cheers,

Rupert

 

jonrey's avatar
jonrey
Occasional Contributor
10 years ago

Hello Rupert,

 

Thank you very much for your well thought-out and impressive reply!

 

This is SO close!  The property expansion returns 2014-02-01T00:00:00 and I'm not sure where the extra "T00:00:00" part is coming from.  Certainly gets me much farther than I was - and helps me learn the syntax - so I'm going to play around with it some more to see if I can get it the last 5% :)

 

Cheers!

  • rupert_anderson's avatar
    rupert_anderson
    Valued Contributor
    10 years ago

    Hi,

    You're welcome, happy to help! :-)

    I'm not sure, but think the 00:00:00 is the HH:MM:SS part of the XML DateTime datatype e.g.

     

    <startdate>2002-05-30T09:00:00</startdate>

    see http://www.w3schools.com/schema/schema_dtypes_date.asp

     

    Are you using a SOAP or XML request with that data type? If so, it will probably force your date to include the time portion.

     

    Cheers,

    Rup

    • rupert_anderson's avatar
      rupert_anderson
      Valued Contributor
      10 years ago

      PS If you're happy with the solution, please can you mark it as accepted if you get a chance so that others might follow it?

      Cheers,
      Rup

    • jonrey's avatar
      jonrey
      Occasional Contributor
      10 years ago

      Haha, I was actually coming back to the board to suggest this very thing.  I'm using a SOAP request and it certainly looks like XML DateTime.  So now I just need to figure out how to tell it to stop being smart and use it as a string.  

       

      I will gladly mark your previous response as the answer, as it is definitely correct (and informative!) for the request.  

      • rupert_anderson's avatar
        rupert_anderson
        Valued Contributor
        10 years ago

        Cool, thanks for accepting it! :-)

        One option to stop the datetime casting would be to use xs:string instead of the xs:datetime, assuming thats acceptable to your interface.

        Cheers,

        Rup