TestProject – API Test Automation with Databases and Shell/File Interactions

This week, I continued reading through the TestProject Tutorial blog I began last week moving onto Chapters 3 and 4, which focused on API Test Automation involving database communications, shell commands, and local file interactions.

The Chapter 3 tutorial focusing on database implementation provides examples of testing connections and querying common types of databases, including Oracle Database, Teradata Database, and MySQL Database using TestProject’s Database Addons. It walks through a specific example of testing a connection to an Oracle Database, showing the successful establishment of the connection. This is taken a step further with an example showing the steps of creating a new table with data extracted from an API request, then setting up and performing an HTTP GET request extracting JSON paths and data from the API response and creating a dynamic query into an Oracle Database Table. I found this portion to be particularly valuable as these tasks seem highly applicable and like common requests of a software dev./analyst, like I plan to be after graduating in May.

Chapter 4 focuses on API test automation flows that incorporate a combination of Shell Commands and/or Local File interactions. As an example demonstration, it shows the steps to access a web page and extract the text using CMD shell commands in conjunction with a GET request, then writing the web page contents to the text file. These functionalities can also be easily implemented using SSH commands, which is also demonstrated. Finally, it goes into how to create and edit/interact with .csv files as a part of the test automation workflow, which can be used for test results and report generation (amongst others).

After going through four of the six chapters in this TestProject tutorial, I can confidently say that it’s a valuable resource and reference in learning about software testing and specifically automation, even if I never end up using the platform. I have been finding the examples to be extremely helpful in demonstrating how to actually use the software and perform some simple real-world tasks, breaking it down into individual test steps. While CS courses commonly include some form of tutorial or demonstration exercise, I personally find that they are often simplified to such a degree that the examples are “unusable”, in that no professional in a real situation would encounter and deal with such a simple task. However, these examples go into more complex applications, such as the earlier example using a combination of commands to extract text from a website, create a new file and write to it. Also, the examples within these tutorials tend to cover a variety of platforms/methods depending on the topic (i.e. a variety of popular databases) maximizing the likelihood for the content to be useful to readers. I’m looking forward to finishing out the last two chapters soon!

Sources:
Tutorial Intro: https://blog.testproject.io/2020/11/10/automating-end-to-end-api-testing-flows/
Chapter 3: https://blog.testproject.io/2020/11/10/api-test-automation-flows-combined-with-database-flows/
Chapter 4: https://blog.testproject.io/2020/11/10/api-test-automation-with-combination-of-shell-commands-and-local-files/