Generating data from a Data definition

You can generate data from a Data definition using the Data fabrication feature of HCL OneTest™ Server.

Before you begin

You must have completed the following tasks:

Ensured that you are assigned a role as a Project Owner or Tester in the project. See Managing access to the server projects.
Created a Data definition. See Creating a Data definition.

Procedure

Log in to HCL OneTest™ Server.

The team space that contains your project is displayed.
Click Active projects > My projects > project_name to open the project that contains the test assets.

The Overview page of the project is displayed.
Click Author > Data.

The Data page and the Data navigator are displayed.
Select the branch from the Branch list.
The navigation panel displays all the existing projects in the selected branch.
Find the Data definition that you want to view, and then click it.

Note: You can either enter the name of the Data definition in the Search field or expand the project and manually search in the Data navigator.

The selected Data definition opens in the Data page.
Click the Preview icon to preview the test data that you want to generate.

The test data is generated in the preview dialog.

Note: You can preview a test data to ensure whether the data is in the expected format. You can thereby have a glimpse of the generated test data that can help you to identify any potential issues, inconsistencies, or errors in the Data definitions. If you modify the data definition but not save it, you can still preview the corresponding test data. However, you can generate the test data only after you save the data definition.
Click the Generate icon either from the Data page or from the preview page.
The Generate data dialog is displayed.
Note: If you are in an edit branch, then you can access the Generate icon from the preview dialog only if the data definition is saved.
Perform the following actions in the Generate data dialog:
1. Enter a name in the Name field to identify the test data when generated.
2. Enter the number of rows that you want to generate in the Number of Rows field.
3. Optional: Enter the seed value in the Seed field.
  
  Whenever you generate test data to perform application testing, the generated data is different. You can produce the same set of data multiple times by setting the seed value.
  
  For example, assume that you have used the seed value as 1 to generate test data from a data definition. When you want to create another test data with the same set of values, then you can provide the seed value as 1 during the creation of the test data.
4. Clear the Include headers option if you do not want to include headers in the generated test data.
5. Click the Download option to initiate the generation of the test data.

Results

The generated test data is downloaded into your local file system as a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file.

Note: You can use other applications that support viewing or editing of the CSV files. You must ensure to apply the relevant formats to the fields to view the correct format of the generated test data.

What to do next

You can view the information about the history of the generated data in the History tab of the Data page.