SoapUI for Data Setup - Use Case

With Soap UI having very useful features, I find this tool helpful for more and more purpose than just testing and coverage. In one of the product implementation, we were trying to setup the initial necessary data (basic and test data) in easy and best way. We needed the initial setup of few organization profiles and users to proceed further in the product implementation. We had three options - 1. Create manually through UI (painful), 2. Create through web service, 3. Write stored procedures (complicated). As second option seemed easy and clean we built the web service requests and ran each of them to setup data. However we felt there was still some more scope for improvement on this. And then flashed the test suite functionality of SoapUI!!

Once I had the idea it was very easy to setup the project on SoapUI with one test case under a test suite. That's it. I created one test step (web service request) for each profile to be created. However user creation required some of the profile information. Property Transfer came in handy to transfer the required values from the response of a specific profile creation request to the user creation request. (I tried many ways to do this with Property Expansion, however couldn't find a way to do this).


The snapshot of the setup is as shown in the figure. As you can see there are multiple SOAP requests, one each for profile/user creation. The property transfer worked fine, however I observed one weird behavior. Though the response xml did not contain any namespace prefix, In Property Transfer I still had to declare the namespace and mention the xpath elements with this namespace prefix. I still need to find a reason for this behavior.

Another notable thing to mention here is to turn on the option to close http connection after every request. Normally SoapUI will open a http connection and sends the web service requests one by one. However due to few unknown problems on data size limit I encountered, the test case was failing at some point midway through the test steps. However after turning on the option to close http connection after every request the data setup ran very smoothly. This option can be accessed under File -> Preferences -> Http Settings.