Automated Report Publishing

From Seapine Labs

Contents 1 About 2 Installation 3 Running 4 Downloads 5 Known Issues

[edit] About

A common feature request I often hear from users is the ability to automatically publish a TestTrack report to a Web site or specified directory. This feature would make it easy to provide updated information to customers, project managers, or even users who are looking for daily work details or statistics on the issue tracking data.

The TestTrack Automated Report Publishing tool will do just that without using ODBC or SOAP.

The project is written in C# and works by making HTTP requests to the TestTrack CGI that mimic the actual TestTrack Web UI. This means that a user only needs to know how to log into TestTrack to use this application.

This will not work with TestTrack 2008 and later versions.

[edit] Installation

The TestTrack Automated Report Publishing program was written in C# and requires the .NET framework. The .NET framework can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft.com Web site.

This program was written against TestTrack 7.6 and may or may not work with other versions of TestTrack.

Apache and IIS are both supported. Most web servers should work but testing was limited to Apache and IIS.

The source code can be opened with Visual Studio .NET 2005.

[edit] Running

The TestTrack Automated Report Publishing program is a command line executable named TTReportPublish.exe.

The tool logs into TestTrack, opens the reports listing page, looks for reports with a unique text identifier(e.g., "zz_" prefix in the report name), and saves the reports to a specified directory location.

There are six input arguments required to run the program. We recommend executing the program from a batch file.

Following are the required arguments:

• TestTrack username - your TestTrack username
• TestTrack password - your TestTrack password
• Full HTTP URL path to ttcgi.exe - URL to the TestTrack CGI program. For example, http://localhost/scripts/ttcgi.exe (on IIS), or http://localhost/cgi-bin/ttcgi.exe (on Apache)
• Prefix for reports to scan for - Any text value, such as zz_, abc, or 123. , e.g., zz_. I use zz_ because it makes it easy to mark. It is necessary to log into TestTrack and create reports or rename existing reports to use the prefix. This is how you can identify which reports you want to publish. Example report name: "zz_OpenDefects".
• Location to copy reports to - Path to save the report to. You can use local directory paths such as C:\Inetpub\wwwroot or UNC paths like \\WebServer\wwwroot.
• The name of the TestTrack project - Name of the project that contains the report.

The 'prefix' naming approach makes it easy to share this program. Anyone can download it, rename some reports to zz_Something, and run this program without having to recode anything.

It is also possible to use multiple batch files for multiple prefixes. Maybe customer1 is zz_ and customer2 is yy_ and customer3 is xx_. Any naming convention will work to identify the report, my recommended way is to use the prefixed ???_ approach with two to four letters, which makes it easier for the program to locate reports.

Another advantage of creating a batch file to run this program is that it will be easy to set up to run automatically with Windows Scheduler.

A sample batch file is included with the downloads with an example of how to run. Make sure to log into TestTrack and set up your reports before running.

If there any errors are encountered, a TTReportPublish.log file is generated in the same directory the .exe is run from.

[edit] Downloads

Binary Download Media:TTReportPublish 1.0.0.zip

Source Download Media:TTReportPublish src 1.0.0.zip

[edit] Known Issues

• I do not know how to get the image to appear so I replaced it with an empty image.
• Did not test against iPlanet, Tomcat, or other less common web servers.

Note: Seapine does not provide support for sample scripts.