Sub-folders under Profile

Background

I have a Katalon Studio project (an application of the VisualTestingInKatalonStudio framework) with a lot of Execution Properties. See the following Screenshot for example.

You can see 11 profiles but in fact I have more than 20. I deleted half of them before taking this screenshot.

Why do I have so many Profiles? Because my test suite collection accepts 5 GlobalVariables as parameters, each of them have wide range of values (2, 4, 20, 50). When I want to run my test suite collection, I often need to create a new combination of GlobalVariable values.

How can I compose a combination of GlobalVariable values? There is only one method — create a new Profile. No other approach I know.

At the moment, this project is in the development stage yet and only one man (me) works on it. However sooner or later, I want to make this project shared via Git remote repository by my team — 14 people.

Problem to solve

When this project is shared by my team, the Profile directory will soon become messy.

The team members would want to create combinations of GlobalVariable values for their own use. The number of combination will burst. Some hundreds of Profiles will be created in a directory. Imagine, 300 entries of Execution Properties listed under the Profile node without sub-tree, that is unmanageable.

What is worse is that it is impossible to safely DELETE a Profile because we can not (easily) tell who in our team created it. We can not (easily) determine if a Profile is used by test or not. So the number of Profiles will continue increasing. It is terrible.

Solution proposed

I should be minimalistic. I want to introduce segmentation of Profiles by sub-folder tree. For example like this:

.
└── Profiles
    ├── CURA
    │   ├── DevelopmentEnv
    │   └── ProductionEnv
    ├── HP
    │   ├── base
    │   │   ├── DevelopmentEnv_category0
    │   │   ├── DevelopmentEnv_category1
    │   │   ├── DevelopmentEnv_category2
    │   │   ├── DevelopmentEnv_category3
    │   │   ├── ProductionEnv_category0
    │   │   ├── ProductionEnv_category1
    │   │   ├── ProductionEnv_category2
    │   │   ├── ProductionEnv_category3
    │   │   ├── StagingEnv_category0
    │   │   ├── StagingEnv_category1
    │   │   ├── StagingEnv_category2
    │   │   └── StagingEnv_category3
    │   ├── brandon_hein
    │   ├── kazurayam
    │   │   ├── DevelopmentEnv_category1_XXXbank_q.exeOnly
    │   │   ├── ProductionEnv_category0_XXXXCompany_quotes_saveHTML_debug
    │   │   ├── ProductionEnv_category0_YYYYEnterprise_search.exe_saveHML
    │   │   ├── ProductionEnv_category0_allServices_q.exeOnly
    │   │   └── ProductionEnv_category2_GOF
    │   ├── mate_mrse
    │   └── ruth
    └── default

It is important that sub-folders can be named with any (non-latin) UNICODE characters

1 Like

Hello, I would also prefer to have folders cause the number of profiles is growing in our project. Please consider adding this feature as soon as possible.

Dear Kazu,

Thanks for your detailed suggestion. I think the way you’re using Execution Profile is as it was designed; therefore, having the folder structure to manage them is a valid point.

For having an overall solution, may I know how do you expect the profiles to display in other places such as the top menu or in the test suite collection?


Does keeping other places the same work for you?

Thanks and Best regards,
Young Ngo

I will think about your question and come back later.

@YoungNgo

I want to remind you of my another topic “ExecutionProfilesLoader”.

ExecutionProfilesLoader enables me to load 2 or more Execution Profiles for a Test Case/Test Suites.

“Sub-folders under Profile” and “ExecutiionProfilesLoader” — both of them comes from a single root problem : I have to make too many Profiles, how to manage them?

“Sub-folders” will keep the number of Profiles unchanged and make it possible to put numerous Profiles into a tree format so that we can easily manage them. On the other hand, “ExecutionProfiilesLoader” enables us to decrease the number of Profiles. We will create smaller number of “elemental Profiles”, and we will form numerous combinations of elemental Profiles by applying multiples Profiles for a single test run.

Please consider both ideas together as both focuses on a single issue.

If I want to apply multiple Execution Profiles for a single run of Test Case/Test Suite, the GUI menu must be drastically changed. I believe, a simple drop down menu is not sufficient.

Once I mentioned that I want Katalon Studio to be natively capable of applying multiple Execution Profiles for a single Test Case/Test Suite run.

I have changed my mind about this point.

I think that nobody but me would require multiple Execution Profiles. Therefore I would not require Katalon Team to consider it too seriously. When I need the ExecutionProfilesLoader feature, I will just use my implementation.

My ExecutionProfilesLoader solution enabled me to decrease the number of Execution Profiles in my project quite drastically: 180 → 16 or less. Therefore, I am no longer so much demanding for “Sub-folders under profile”.

However as @Dmitriy suggested, “Sub-folders in Profiles” might be a nice-to-have feature. Especially for the teams who share one Katalon project with multiple members if they want to compose a lot of Execution Profiles individually. Sub-folders of each personnel’s name will be easiest way to avoid stepping on toes.

Well, JFace Tree View would be fine. List all the Exceution Profiles defined and let us choose only one. That’s fine.

I made a new post:

In this post, I have got a new solution to my problem, and consequently I am going to have hundreds of Execution Profiles (Profiles/*.glbl files) generated by tool.

I have changed my idea. I would strongly demand “Sub-folders under Profiles” to be supported.