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Hidden XML Tool

test tools
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For those of you who don't know, I'm a avid user of the IBM Rational tools. I don't necessarily think they're that much better then any other commercial test tool, but I've done a lot of work with them. I know them fairly well, and they've been good to me over the past few years. All said and done they get the job done.

Having said that, I use the Rational tools a lot.

Recently I've also been doing a lot of web service testing which means I'm looking at a lot of XML. Imagine my surprise today when someone told me that there is an XML diff tool included in the Rational suite of tools. Shocked that I didn't know such a thing, I checked it out. You can find it here: "C:\Program Files\Rational\ClearCase\bin\xmldiffmrg.exe"

So clearly, I don't do a lot with ClearCase or I would already know about this tool.

Either way, I checked it out and I kinda like it. I figure if I didn't know it was there, others might not as know either. If you're paying for the Rational suite of tools, you need to get all the mileage out of them that you can.

If anyone else knows of any other hidden utilities or tools they would like to share, feel free to post them below (Rational related or not). Let's get the word out. I don't like it when I have useful tools installed that I don't even know I have.


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I mean, what is "mdrv" suppos

I mean, what is "mdrv" supposed to stand for anyway??

Yeah, I've found a hidden tool...

For VUGen, Mercury. You can pass scripts command line options. But there is apparently nowhere to do this in VUGen, you know like a text field setting you could put the command line parameters in. Yet, Test Center has exactly that. So, the question becomes, how to test what my script does with command line parameters, so that I can use them with it in Test Center? Enter the hidden tool.

Couldn't find anything with Google about it (though hopefully people will be able to now) and as usual Mercury's customer contributed knowledgebase came up empty. I'm never gonna earn enough points to get a Mercury logo hat! Of couse if I did, I'd just have to burn it.

Anyway, a call to Mercury tech support later, I got this. Open a command prompt and go to the folder your script is in, and enter this:

mdrv -usr yourScriptName.usr -yourCommandLineParameter itsvalue

The vuser log file is called output.txt and is in the same folder. Presumably you can have multiple command line parameters...

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