Loadrunner replay and xml in the viewer

Question

Recording and replaying against a web app using Ajax seems to work after some serious correlation work :-) However replaying the script with the viewer turned on I observe that during some steps in the replay the pages being dislayed contains i.e. only XML on the form <ajax-respons> .... [CDATA ...(The data I have put in and parameterized)] ...... </ajax-response> and not GUI. The business process also works as I can observe that the process is excuted as expected with the expected results. My question is basically why LoadRunner displays this XML in the viewer and if that is some sign of somthing being wrong? Has someone else experienced this?

Answer 1

The LoadRunner viewer that runs during playback of your script is not a full web browser. It only displays the particular non-resource file being requested during the script steps. Since the step only requests an XML file at that point in your script that is all that will be displayed there.

That viewer is only a sanity check tool to give you an overview of how things are running. If you want a more detailed look rely on the output log by expanding the log settings or write proper error handling functions into your script or use the tree view after executing your script and for each step you view there switch to the playback view, compare the playback / recorded views.