Ranorex Forum

Hello everyone,
If anyone has some experience with Ranorex distributed testing, please give me a hand. I need to test a client server application on different computers. Let me briefly explain: I have a client - server application (both client and server are desktop applications and they communicate by using the server web services). The server part is not important at this stage, all I have to do is to open two clients on two different computers, modify some data on one client and verify that the date is automatically updated on the second client also (any data update performed on one client is immediately available to all the clients). So, in order to achieve this, I guess I have to run something like this: on one client computer, run a test which updates data and then checks if the update is available, on the other client computer I have to run a test which just checks to see if the update performed on the first computer is also available on this second client. Timing is very important, i think the two tests running on the two client computers should be synchronized, I mean that the checking for data update is triggered simultaneously on both client computers and also there should be only one test report.
If anyone had encounter this type of testing, please explain me how it can be performed, I did not find anything conclusive so far.

Thank You

Ranorex is designed for single instance UI functional testing, not load or distributed testing. In order for this to work there would need to be a lot of coding done on your side of things, that I doubt would be of great value ROI-wise, given the time it would take.

If you want to have only one report, then you will either need to take the two separate reports that would be produced in your scenario and merge them (not easy) or you would need to run the whole test in one RX Test Suite on one system.

Can you run 2 instances of your client application at the same time on one system? If so, you could login to 2 different users (or whatever the case may be) and just run the test on each window. If there is a way to uniquely identify each window, this would be easy to do through the Repository by variablizing some of the repository objects.

If you cannot run 2 at the same time, there might be a way to do it using a SQL Server DB as a go-between/timing synchronization mechanism, but this would take a LOT of time and code and would be very delicate.

Thank you for reply and suggestions. I already tried to run 2 clients with different user accounts on one computer. Unfortunately, not all the clients features are working properly in this scenario. The problems are currently under investigation by our dev team, we hope they will be solved without much effort in order to use this scenario as an alternative approach for distributed testing. Still, we are searching for a way to perform automated distributed testing because of the type of our AUT (maybe using other tools which provide such a feature or even implementing some basic type of distributed testing with Ranorex).