Changelog 2021.09

Browser Bots: Select Options by Value, Text, or Index

We’ve made it easier to choose the option you want from Browser Bot Select steps. Now, you can specify an option by text, by value, or by index. Consider the following HTML:

<select name="countries">
  <option value="CR">Costa Rica</option>
  <option value="HR">Croatia</option>
  <option value="CU">Cuba</option>
</select>

To choose Croatia, your step can specify CR to select by value, "Croatia" with double quotes to select by text, or [1] with square brackets to select by index.

Browser Bots: Manage Multiple Browser Windows

We used to assume that each Browser Bot would only control a single browser window or tab at a time. Not anymore! Now you can toggle between browser windows, close a window, and list the bot’s browser windows programmatically in a code block.

// List all of the bot's browser windows/tabs
browser.listWindows();

// Get the bot's currently active browser window/tab
browser.getActiveWindow(); // 0, 1, 2...

// Focus a different browser window/tab
browser.setActiveWindow(0); // the bot's original tab
browser.setActiveWindow(1); // the first opened tab
browser.setActiveWindow(2); // and so on...

// Close a browser window/tab
browser.closeWindow(1);

Each Browser Bot starts out with a single window, but if your site opens links in another tab or pops up another window, it will be added to the list.

Speedway Site & API Monitoring

We’re pleased to announce Loadster’s sidekick application, Speedway, for Site & API monitoring!

You probably noticed the monitoring feature in Loadster this past year: run a Loadster script on a schedule and get alerted if anything goes wrong. It’s kind of like Pingdom or Uptime, but with more powerful scripting.

This monitoring approach is often called active monitoring or synthetic monitoring, and it’s an important part of the site reliability stack. Active monitoring is highly recommended if you want to be alerted of site downtime and breakage, especially if you want to test multiple pages or endpoints back to back.

The scripting is the same, but the motivations and methodology are a bit different between load testing and monitoring.

Reusing your load test scripts for active monitoring (and vice versa) saves time on script creation and reduces the effort of maintaining your scripts, while making sure you can react quickly to problems and be proactive about it.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

• Added the full results from Scrape and Evaluate steps to the result details, which you can see by clicking on the card in the Timeline.
• Clarified the users per team limit on the Team page.
• Clarified the confusing error message when a Wait For step times out.