Guidelines for setting .NET filters

When testing your .NET application, your goal is to determine how the server reacts to requests from the client. When load testing, you want to see how the server responds to a load of multiple users.

When recording a .NET application, your script may include calls to methods that do not affect the server, such as calls to a local utility or the GUI interface. These calls are usually not relevant to your testing goals, and it would be correct to filter them out.

The built-in filters, .NET Remoting, ADO.NET, Enterprise Services, and WCF, were designed to record only the server related traffic relevant to your testing goals. In some instances, however, you may need to customize filters to capture your .NET application's calls or exclude unnecessary calls. Using the .NET Recording Filter pane [.NET protocol], you can design custom filters to exclude the irrelevant calls and capture the server related calls.

Before creating a test, we recommend that you become familiar with your application and determine its primary classes and methods, so that you know which ones to include in your recording.

If you are not familiar with your application's classes, you can use Visual Studio or a Stack Trace to help you determine which methods are being called by your application in order to include them in the filter. VuGen allows you to record with a stack trace that logs all of the methods that were called by your application.

Once you determine the required methods and classes, you include them using the .NET Recording Filter pane. When preparing a script, you may need to customize the filter several times in order to achieve the optimal filter. An optimal filter records the relevant methods without introducing a large number of irrelevant calls to the script.

Tip: Strive to modify the filter so that your script compiles (Shift+F5) inside VuGen. Then customize the filter further to create a functional script that runs inside VuGen.

If you plan to add manual code to your script such as control flow or message statements, make sure to do so after you have a functional script that runs inside VuGen. The reason for this is that if you re-record a script or regenerate the script, you will lose all of the manual changes.