Handling test environments with Soap UI

Dealing with multiple environments for a a piece of software is something most of us do. At the very least, you'll have a testing environment that is separate from your production environment. In many cases there will be a lot of testing environments, representing the different stages of quality assurance.
Some examples might be:

• Developer sandbox
• Internal test
• External test
• Acceptance test
• Pre-production
• Production

When using Soap UI for testing, you want to be able to perform tests in all of your environments. Previously we kind of struggled with this since we had to have separate projects for each environment. Maintaining tests through theses stages was a real pain...

Each environment had its own endpoint for the webservice under test. But since we also test stuff with the database, each environment would have its own connection string. The endpoint problem was quire easy to handle manually through the Assign menu option in the WSDL interface screen. But reassigning the database connection was something else.

I recently managed to create a way that took away the need for those separate projects completely. This post will try to explain my way of doing it and hopefully there is someone that has an even better solution...

1. Open the "overview" tab of the project, by double-clicking it

The project view has some really good features worth exploring. Properties are really powerful, but there is more - wait and see...

2. Create a property under your project, called "Environment"

This property will hold the name of your environment, such as "Dev", "Acceptance" or "Pre-production".

3. Create one property for each of your service endpoint adresses

You'll need to create one property for each environment, which is tiresome - but on the other hand creates a good place to find those hard-to-remember-addresses!

4. Create one property for each of your database connections

I am using the jtds driver, enabling Windows authentication for SQL server using Soap UI.

5. Hook in to the event model

Now this was something new for me. Soap UI has a pretty extensive event model that enables you to execute code on certain events. 

Still in the project view, open the "Events" tab. Click on the + to add a new event handler. 

I selected the "TestSuiteRunListener.beforeRun" event which fires just before an entire test suite is run. This way, my environment configuration will fire only when I run the entire suite. Executing single test cases is something I'll do more in the development stage of things. 

There are many events to select from and I have not examined them all, but most names are pretty self-explanatory.

Now you'll end up with an empty Groovy script code window. I'll break my script up into pieces to make it easier to read. Sorry about the images, but I couldn't get syntax coloring otherwise...
The text version is here.

First we need to import some stuff..

Then i collect all of the property values we created earlier

Then lets just do an if-statement, checking which is the selected environment, keeping in mind that someone may have entered something incorrectly.

Finally to the actual code that does anything. First we loop through all the test steps of all test cases in all the suites to find steps that use the web service. There we replace the endpoint adress with the selected one. Then we repeat the procedure with our connection string. 

In summary

So, what does this do?

Whenever I run a test case this event handler will reset all requests to use the wsdl endpoint of my choice and the connection string that we want. The code isn't pretty our optimized, but that's not my concern just now. I wanted to see if it could be done. And it could. 

Any better ideas (which there must be?!) are appreciated!!