Monday, June 11, 2012

Interactive OSB Testing


Interactive Testing with OSB Test Console

Oracle Service Bus has a built-in test console for the interactive testing of OSB artifacts at runtime. It generates synthetic payloads (including security tokens) based on the service description. Note that the test console performs an actual invocation of services - which can have unintended consequences on production systems. Therefore, use the test console only on development and staging systems and block it on production systems. 

Note that interactive testing only gets you so far. What you really want is automatic unit testing of OSB as the basis for regression testing and continuous integation, as well as test-driven development (TDD).
The test console is accessed via the icon 

Business services are backend service definitions in OSB. The test console invokes the actual backend service and therefore tests its correct endpoint configuration, its availability as well as any downstream dependencies the backend service may have (DBs, etc.).

Test console can invoke proxy services. The invocation triggers off the proxies pipeline which is graphically displayed in an invocation trace . The invocation trace contains detailed information about each step and variable values recorded during execution.



The following transformation types are supported in OSB an can be tested with the test console. For various transformation actions the test icon is available:
  • XSLT transformations in OSB are used for XML-to-XML mappings. You can test them with source XML formats within the test console. The test console displays named parameters supported by the transformation.
  • XQuery transformations  work with either XML or non-XML input
  • MFL is used to describe non-XML data formats and the layout of binary and text data in these formats.  The test console can verify the correct bidirectional mapping.