I had lunch with some friends from one of my old clients today.  I found out they were in the midst of a Sun Identity Management implementation project.  It was interesting to hear them vent about what they didn’t like about the product.  Now I don’t pretend to know anything about Sun Identity Management and I'm sure it does a great job overall, but here’s what I remember from the conversation:

A few months ago I had an opportunity to do performance testing, but I didn’t have a commercial performance testing tool available.  Our users were way too busy to pound on the system until we got it tuned the way we liked, so I started looking for open source or cheap tools to help out.  I ended up getting to know a product called BadBoy (http://www.badboy.com.au) very well.

I haven’t written about BadBoy on this blog yet, but it certainly deserves some attention.  In a sense, it reminds me of what you could once do with SQA Robot and PeopleTools 7.x.  Essentially you can record a session, and play it back as a script.  Badboy isn’t open source, but it is free if you don’t install it on more than 5 workstations in your organization, and it’s cheap for everybody.  A 10 license pack is only $250 USD. 

There are several features that make it a very nice tool for PeopleSoft testing:

I especially liked the Regular Expression matching features.  I had one script that ran a query, and applied AR payments to items depending on the results of that query.

Bookmarklets are little Java programs contained in a bookmark that can (among many other things) dynamically generate a URL and send your browser to it.  While I’m not crazy about the name, they’re awesome when you’re working in PeopleSoft because you can have a set of buttons on your bookmarks toolbar that’ll work across all of the PeopleSoft environments you have to log in to.

I use Bookmarklets for basically three different purposes:  1) To replace the “Favorites” functionality built into PeopleSoft so that I don’t have to maintain favorites in different environments; 2) To jump to the component I’m currently viewing in a different environment; and 3) To call iScripts and Servlet Directives within the context of the current environment.

Replacing the Favorites functionality

Don’t get me wrong, the Favorites functionality in PeopleSoft is good.  But the problem is that it’s a pain to set up the same favorites in Dev, Test, Production, Demo, etc.  But I can set up a bookmarklet that will take me to a folder or component in the current environment.  And if the DBA creates a new environment, my bookmarklets will still work.

Say you’re logged on to an environment called FDEV90 adding new departments. The URL in your browser might look like this:

http://dev.erpassociates.com:11000/psc/FDEV90/EMPLOYEE/ERP/c/DESIGN_CHARTFIELDS.DEPARTMENT.GBL

You could add this to your favorites in your browser, but it’ll only work for FDEV90, not for say FTST90.  But a bookmarklet can build its own URL by taking the first part of the URL (i.e. http://dev.erpassociates.com:11000/psc/FDEV90) , appending the page you want to bookmark (i.e. /EMPLOYEE/ERP /c/DESIGN_CHARTFIELDS.DEPARTMENT.GBL), and redirecting your browser to this new URL. 

Here’s what a bookmarklet looks like that will take you to process monitor of whatever environment you happen to be working in:

The other day I really needed to load some Receivables data into PeopleSoft to test a workflow application.  I had a handy-dandy ExcelToCI spreadsheet made just for this purpose, so it should have been a non-event.  However, I’d just upgraded to Office 2007 (insert Darth-Vader musical score here).  After an initial panic attack when I realized there were no guarantees this would work at all, I decided to take it one step at a time.  And as it turned out, it wasn’t so bad.

Here’s what I did to make ExcelToCI work with Office 2007: