Changing endpoint from the command line when testing services with SOAPUi

· March 30, 2010

Tools   .NET   Life of a consultant   C#   WCF

I have been singing SOAPUi’s praises lately and it’s really great for testing services. In this post I describe how I made the whole thing work for testing WCF Services. But, as stated in this post, there was still one more thing to be solved… The endpoints from the command line. You want to use different endpoints in different environments. And in my specific customer case I want one of them to stay the same all of the time, since that endpoint points (sorry, could not resist myself) to a “singleton” kind of service. Luckily the SOAPUi team also have some great support (Thanks Ole, who replied in Swedish!). So here you have it – how to change the endpoint for one of your services under test from the command line – which in my case means the build script.

  1. I first created a sample WCF service project (very vanilla, I didn’t touch the code just the default generated code). By the way; really cool hosting and test client stuff in Visual Studio 2010

  2. I changed the binding to basicHttpBinding since that’s the only thing that work with SOAPUi. I used the WCF Service Configuration tool in Visual Studio of course.

  3. I then created a normal SOAPUi project and let SOAPUi create testcases for me. I added asserts just to make sure that the I didn’t get an error back.

  4. I started my service and ran the testcases – It worked!

  5. I then, and here is the trick, created a project-wide property (Click project file and chose Custom properties in the lower part of the project window) to hold the endpoint value.

    1. I named the project wide property DemoServiceEndpoint
    2. I gave it the address of the service I was testing as value

  6. I then opened the tree down to the test request in question and then chose the Test Property-tab in the lower part of the project tree

  7. Here I entered this expression that reads the value from my project wide property:     ${#Project#DemoServiceEndpoint}

  8. I repeated for my other test request and tested. It still worked!

  9. OK – we’re closing in now. Now I used the Test Runner to create my command (nifty stuff SOAPUi dudes!). Here I got the opportunity to set my parameter ${#Project#DemoServiceEndpoint}.

  10. After some tweaking I managed to “harvest” the command into a .bat-file.

    “C:\Program Files (x86)\eviware\soapUI-3.5\bin\testrunner.bat” -sDemoTestSuite -PDemoServiceEndpoint=http://localhost:8732/Design_Time_Addresses/Marcusoft.SOAPUiDemo.WCFService/Service1/ C:\Dev\Marcusoft.SOAPUiDemo\EndPointOverrideDemo-soapui-project.xml

  11. And it worked!

So now I can change the endpoint from the command line! In my build script when I have deployed the service to the testing environment for example! Yeah!

You can download my example here.

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