Default variables and select lists in JMeter

Question

I have recorded session with recording controller in JMeter.

I was filling lot of forms in this session. There was also selectboxes with values depends values in other forms.

for example:

for value: "john" in textbox, in my selectbox appears values "1" and "2" 
(one these i need to choose - noone is choosen by default)

for value: "jack" in textbox, in my selectbox appears values "3" and "4" 
(the same as above)

How to set in Jmeter to select first from available values in this selectbox?

Answer 1

There is smth like Xpath extractor in Jmeter. Add it to a HTTP Request before this page where u have selectbox (becouse page before got response with this selectbox)

Assuming your selectbox is have id = "selectboxid" u can use smth like this:

//select[@id="selectboxid"]/option[1]/@value

Take a look on some Xpath tutorials to learn more

Answer 2

Assuming you are selecting these values with a POST request you can use the parameters to do something like this -

NAME VALUE
HasAccount false
Settings.ageGroup ${__Random(1,4)}

This is on a newsletter sign up page I was testing. The parameters that are set to false (or true) are for checkboxes and radio buttons. The other one is a dropdown where I wanted to select a random value.

In your case, I imagine this could result in some invalid values. I think the best option is a small Beanshell (or similar) sampler that evaluates whether Jack or John has been selected. This is will obviously scale very badly if you have lots of users though.