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rwood_cert's avatar
rwood_cert
Occasional Contributor
2 years ago

TestComplete v15.56 software saving string variables with Base64 encoding

Hi,

 

I've had a few reports from our testers, about persistent variables in the .mds file being saved as what appears to be a Base64 encoded string, in our case it affects our test process currently, as we're expecting them as plain text/we're not decoding Base64, we run the tests in Azure DevOps via the Visual Studio test task.

 

I've determined this appears to have been a change in v15.56 as I wasn't able to replicate the same behaviour in v15.55, though I'm waiting for one of the testers to confirm the same results (to rule out any extension issues).

 

The change/behaviour I've described above is not listed in the release notes though - https://support.smartbear.com/testcomplete/docs/general-info/whats-new.html

 

Can it be clarified if this is an intended change or a bug?

If it is an intended change is there anyway we can override this so string variables are saved as plain text in the .mds file?

Whether that's via a program/GUI setting or a bit of code/scripting?

 

Thanks

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  • jrsbr's avatar
    jrsbr
    Contributor
    2 years ago

    I've been getting the same since upgrading to V15.56.  That was actually a fix to a serious bug we were having and now have hundreds of string variables now stored and overwritten by corrupted garbage with breaks hundreds of tests stopping us testing. 

    https://community.smartbear.com/t5/TestComplete-Questions/Corrupted-Project-and-Keyword-Test-variables/m-p/259412#M112759

     

    We are going to use a Notepad++ macro to find all the variables in the various files and use a conversion utitlity to try and set them back to their correct values.

    We have opened ticket 00574549 for this.  We're worried other projects will be impacted.

    The quality of TC releases has become poorer over the last 2-3 years and we want to have a conversation with our account manager to get some feedback from the Product Manager.  We dont want to make further investments if this is now the norm.  Its dissapointing to see, as I've used it for 12 years and its never been like this.

  • rwood_cert's avatar
    rwood_cert
    Occasional Contributor
    2 years ago

    We ended up reverting the .mds file changes in our Git repo to get the original string values back, fortunately we'd not changed much else in there, that we couldn't quickly replace after downgrading the software.

    I'm not familiar with the software and wouldn't be as a DevOps Engineer, but we do help a bit on the integration/DevOps side for it, had maybe a year with it, our testers are much more familiar, but in my experience so far I feel the comms could have been better, been left in the dark a bit on the fix progress or confirmation of the issues.

    The Azure DevOps test adapter issues in August were much more impactful, had a very dirty fix/bypass for that.

     

    On another note some initial testing of v15.57 on my side, it seems the Base64 encoding issue might be gone, or at least I couldn't recreate it like before, but this was only a quick test I had.

     

    We'll still be treading a bit carefully with the new version, with most testers sticking on v15.55 for now.

  • jrsbr's avatar
    jrsbr
    Contributor
    2 years ago

    rwood_certWe have had exactly the same issues lately including crashes when accessing TestComplete on a VM with different user profiles which totally locked up the VM when TC opened.  Fortunately its fixed but it took months of frustrating "support" which took us in circles many times!   We were about to purchase ReadyAPI and thats stalled due to various issues with that as well.

     

    To confirm 15.57.2.7 we have not seen variables being corrupted but we need to do more testing.

    I am beginging to question the quality of testing for the latest releases.

  • rraghvani's avatar
    rraghvani
    Champion Level 3
    2 years ago

    TC v15.55.53.7 shows

     

    .mds

    .pjs

     

    I haven't installed the latest version, as it's reported there's a few issues.