We have released a new upgrade to our script editor which is part of our ongoing commitment to build the best Synthetic User Journey monitoring tool on the market – Journey Pre-Actions.
This upgrade is simple but will be useful for those websites that require certain prerequisites in order to allow tests such as these to be run. As with many of our features here at RapidSpike, this was born from a real-world requirement from a number of our customers.
Our users can now add a set of “Pre-Actions” that will run at the start before the journey initiates. The main uses of this would be to apply cookies to the browser session before the journey starts or for generating data items for use later in the journeys. You could even generate data items to add into cookies!
As an example, let’s say you are testing a website that is architected to block traffic from bots such as our user journey software. One way this bot protection may be avoided is via predefined tokens or keys appearing in cookies. Now, you could add a Pre-Action for adding a cookie with these values in.
Another use would be to generate dynamic date values for use in a holiday search engine, or in a parameter in the start URL. You could add a “Generate Item” Pre-Action to create a pair of dates that are +3 and +4 months from now. They would be saved to variables defined by you – say “date_start” and “date_end” – and then you can use them in forms and the URL by referencing them like this: %date_start% and %date_end%.
In our roadmap, we plan to extend the concept to Post-Actions; a set of actions that will always run at the end of a journey regardless of the outcome of the journey. Particularly useful for ecommerce journeys that involved reserving items in baskets. Whether the journey passes or fails, a set of Post-Actions could be defined that would navigate to and empty the basket. Of course, if the journey has failed due to a failure in the basket and checkout process then this would be difficult.
If there are any other ideas or requests that you would like to discuss with us then please feel free to contact our support team or your assigned account manager through the usual channels.
