Metadata-based Test Data Generation

• US 20140007056A1
• Filed: 06/28/2012
• Published: 01/02/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 06/28/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Micro Focus LLC (Open Text Corporation)
• Original Assignee: entIT Software LLC (Open Text Corporation)
• Inventors: Meirman, Ilan, Leizerovich, Maxim
• Granted Patent: US 9,734,214 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 717/124
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3684 for test design, e.g. generating new test cases
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3688 for test execution, e.g. scheduling of test suites
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/215 Improving data quality; Data cleansing, e.g. de-duplication, removing invalid entries or correcting typographical errors
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24564 Applying rules; Deductive queries
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2458 Special types of queries, e.g. statistical queries, fuzzy queries or distributed queries
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/273 Asynchronous replication or reconciliation

Abstract

Example embodiments disclosed herein relate to a method for generating test data for form validation, where the method includes maintaining metadata for a database, mapping a control field of the form to a column of the database, and generating test data based on the mapping and the metadata.

Claims

1. A method for leveraging database metadata to generate test data for form validation, the method comprising:

maintaining metadata for the database;

mapping a control field of the form to a column of the database; and

generating test data based on the mapping and the metadata.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein mapping comprises receiving user input for associating the column of the database to the control field of the form.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein mapping is performed automatically using control field-to-column mapping algorithms.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein generating the test data comprises generating at least one of negative test data and test data for inter-field logic validation.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the inter-field logic validation test data comprises test data for validating relationships between multiple combo fields of the form.

6. The method of claim 4, wherein the negative test data comprises at least one of extreme values, illegal values, and restricted values for testing the form.

7. The method of claim 1, comprising generating test scripts based on the test data and executing the test scripts to validate the form.

8. A system for generating test data for validating a form, the system comprising:

a metadata extraction engine to extract metadata from a database;

a mapping engine to map a control field of the form to a column of the database; and

a test data generation engine to generate test data for testing the form based on the metadata and the mapping.

9. The system of claim 8, wherein the test data includes at least one of test data for negative testing and test data for inter-field logic testing.

10. The system of claim 8, comprising a test execution engine to generate test scripts for injecting the test data during testing.

11. The system of claim 8, wherein the database metadata includes at least one of field types, field lengths, mandatory field indications, column relationships, column constraints, column rules, and other database properties and structures.

12. The system of claim 8, wherein mapping is performed based via at least one of user input and a mapping algorithm.

13. A non-transitory computer readable medium comprising instructions that when executed implement a method for using database metadata to generate test data for form logic validation, the method comprising:

extracting metadata from table columns of the database;

mapping a field of the form to a column of the database; and

generating at least one of negative test data and test data for inter-field logic validation based on the mapped metadata.

14. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 13, wherein the database metadata includes at least one of field type, field maximum length, mandatory field indicator, column relationships, column constraints, column rules, business rules, and other database properties and structures.

15. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 13, wherein mapping comprises mapping the form field to column metadata.

16. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 13, wherein mapping comprises receiving user input for mapping the form field to the column metadata.

17. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 13, wherein mapping comprises automatically mapping the form field to the column metadata.

18. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 13, wherein the test data for inter-field logic validation comprises test data for validating data values in a combo control field based on mapped data column and lookup tables associated with the combo control field.

19. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 13, the test data for inter-field logic validation comprises test data for validating a relation between multiple combo fields based on their relation in the database.

20. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 13, wherein the negative test data comprises at least one of extreme values, illegal values, and restricted values for testing the form.