Creating Dynamic itemdata in Web_submit_data in load runner

I was working on a project where there was a scenario of searching for a course by its first name or wild cards. The search returns different number of results for different queries. This request is followed by another web_submit_data where the ITEMDATA depends on number of search results.

There are three dynamic variables here – length of the course variable, results returned and the third one being the ITEMDATA of the request itself.

The solution is to build dynamic data on the fly and create a web_custom_request for the web_submit_data

The following function will build the item data -

const char* BuildItemData(int pageSize,const char*ItemDataStart,const char*ItemDataEnd, int lengthOfCourseVar, const char* ArrayName){

char* ItemData;

int iCount,lengthOfOneItem;

lengthOfOneItem = lengthOfCourseVar+strlen(ItemDataStart)+strlen(ItemDataEnd);

ItemData = (char*)malloc((pageSize*(lengthOfOneItem))*sizeof(char));

ItemData[0]=”;

for(iCount=1;iCount<=(pageSize);iCount++)

{

strcat(ItemData,ItemDataStart);

strcat(ItemData,lr_paramarr_idx(ArrayName,iCount));

strcat(ItemData,ItemDataEnd);

}

return ItemData;

}
I changed the web_submit_data to web_custom_request and used the string output as a parameter like this:

lr_save_string( BuildItemData(lr_paramarr_len(“cor_Arr_ClassIDs”),”offId[]=class”,”&”,strlen(lr_paramarr_idx(“cor_Arr_ClassIDs”,1)),”cor_Arr_ClassIDs”),
“ItemDataOnTheFly” );

web_custom_request(“xxxxxxx.aspx”,

“URL=https://{par_Environment_URL}/xxxxxx/xxxxxx.aspx”,

“Method=POST”,

“TargetFrame=”,

“Resource=0″,

“RecContentType=text/html”,

“Referer=https://{par_Environment_URL}/xxx/xxx/xxx/xxxx/xx/xxxxxx?xxxxxx={par_Location}”,

“Snapshot=t12.inf”,

“Mode=HTML”,
“EncType=application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8″,

“Body={ItemDataOnTheFly}&lrnid=xxxxx/{par_UserID}”,

LAST);