Testing Payloads

This section outlines an approach that has been developed and used successfully. It is recommended that you have a test environment in which you can run and refine your payloads. You should avoid running test payloads in a production environment unless you have good reasons for doing so. Your System Administrator should be able to provide help and guidance on selecting or setting up a suitable testing environment.

First Steps

Before starting, you should back-up the database(s) that you intend to use.

The quickest way of creating payloads is to use Connect Portal. Open Connect Portal and select the component you want to use. Select the method, then select Create Empty Input Payload, right-click and select View Source.

Delete the blank lines at the start of the file. You can now make a start on populating all the elements you need with valid values, or those that you believe to be valid. Refer to the SSC Technical Reference Help, or the SunSystems Component Manager (COM) function for details on which elements are mandatory, allowable element values and other information.

Query Payloads

In the early stages of testing, you may find it beneficial to have a Query Manager (if you are running a Microsoft SQL Server SunSystems version) or TOAD (if you have an Oracle version) session running concurrently to verify that the database is updated.

Payloads using the Query method can be invaluable when developing payloads or automations if you do not have access to either of these tools.

You can run a query payload before a create, or an amend, payload then subsequenntly run another query payload.

In the case of a create, the 'before' query returns an empty payload (as nothing has been created yet) and the 'after' query to return the details of whatever was created. Similarly, with an amend, the 'before' query returns the existing details (as nothing has been amended yet) and the 'after' query to return the value(s) of whatever was amended.

You can compare the two query files manually (or by using a file comparison utility) to prove that the payload worked as expected.