This section applies to the Populate option, which is available for Form Input and Form JSON trees. In this section:

Introduction

Manually creating an Excel spreadsheet for the data and parameterizing each individual element in complex request messages would be time-consuming and tedious. If you have an existing data source, you can use the populate feature to automatically map data source values to message elements. If you do not already have a data source with these values, you can use the populate feature to automatically generate simple values for a set of form fields. You can also automatically generate and then complete a data source template as described in Generating a Data Source Template for Populating Message Elements_soa.

Data Source Mapping and Naming Conventions

When parameterizing element or attribute values, there are three possibilities: 

• Specifying a value
• Specifying that an element should be Nil or Null
• Specifying that an element should be excluded entirely.

We'll discuss data source mapping using the following example, which represents a complex request message that contains elements that you may want to parameterize. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
 <SOAP-ENV:Body>
  <addNewItems xmlns="http://www.parasoft.com/wsdl/store-01/">
   <book>
    <id xmlns="">0</id>
    <title xmlns=""></title>
    <price xmlns="">0.0</price>
    <authors xmlns="">
     <i></i>
     <i></i>
    </authors>
    <publisher xmlns="">
     <id myAtt="attVal">1</id>
    </publisher>
   </book>
  </addNewItems>
 </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

The example includes arrays with a variable number of elements (the list of authors). Using the populate feature with the associated data source naming conventions is more efficient than manually populating elements and allows you to focus on designing use cases in a data-driven manner (using data sources), instead of focusing on the error-prone method of individually configuring each message parameter.

Specifying Values

Matching data source columns to request elements is accomplished through the use of certain naming conventions applied to the data source column names. In the example XML above, there are two elements named id. You could distinguish the elements by naming one column book/id and the other book/publisher/id.  

The naming convention mimics a file directory structure or an XPath. Attributes are similarly identified, with the additional specification of the @ symbol. In the example above, book/publisher/id@myAtt refers to the attribute myAtt of the publisher ID.

Several elements may have the same name, such as the example's book/authors/i identifier in the authors element. You can identify repeated elements with array numbers inside parentheses "()" if the elements have the same name. For example, book/authors/i(1) identifies the first element, and book/authors/i(2) identifies the second.

Specifying Nil and Exclude

In some cases, you may want an element to have a nil value or be excluded in the request message. By default, appending XL for exclude and NIL for nil values will accomplish this goal. For example, a column named book/authors/iXL(2) will allow you to indicate that the second child of the authors element should not be sent, such as for the case where there is only one author.

Usage

1. Right-click in a blank area of the tree (not on a specific element) and select Populate.
   
2. Enable Map parameter values to data source columns to tell SOAtest to automatically set each form input parameter to Parameterized.
3. Select the data source column with a name that matches the parameter name. For example, if the data source has a column name "title" and one of the form input elements has the same name "title", then the "title" element will be mapped to the data source column "title", and so on.
4. Customize the remaining options as needed. See Populate Wizard Options for details.
5. Click OK.

Populate Wizard Options

Anchor
Populatе_Wiz_Options Populatе_Wiz_Options

Data Source Mapping and Naming Conventions

For both sequence (Array) and nested types: The value mapping and exclude/nillable mappings are based on name-matching conventions between the element name and the column name. However, there are cases where the same element name is reused within the XML message, so mapping collisions need to be avoided if one-to-one mapping between each element and data source column is to be maintained.

For nested complex types: XPath-like data source column names can be used to disambiguate. For example, instead of using the data column name "title", you may use "book/title" as the column name and it would therefore be mapped to any "title" elements falling under "book". If that can lead to ambiguity, you may also use a column name such as "addNewItem/book/title" to further identify which element it is supposed to be associated with.

For sequence types (arrays where items with the same name are repeated): Item index numbers can be used to disambiguate. For example, in the Parasoft store service the book type has an authors element, which in turn can have many "i" elements indicating a list of authors. Only using the data source column name "i" would result in that data source column being mapped to all occurrences of element "i". 

Using data source column name "i[2]" which results in that column name being mapped to all occurrences of "i" as the second item in the sequence. (The index numbers start from 1, not 0 as per the XPath specification). If the column name "authors/i[2]" is used, then it will be mapped only to the second item "i" element under the "authors".

Note: if there happens to be multiple "authors" elements in the XML message, then all of them would be mapped accordingly, unless the column names are disambiguated with enough XPath parent nodes to make the mapping one-to-one. Parentheses can be used as the numeric index syntax, so "authors/i(2)" will map to the same elements as "authors/i[2]". The () syntax is inconsistent with the XPath specification, but it is helpful when database data sources are used where [] is not a valid SQL character.

Exclude and Nillable mapping: Follows the same XPath and indexing conventions as values. For example, to exclude/include the "i" element based on a data source column, you may use the column name "authors/iXL[2]" to indicate specifically which elements it is intended for.