Reading Data from Excel

Data-driven testing is a helpful feature for the following scenarios:

• When business users would like to have ownership over the test data in your automated tests
• When you have multiple data permutations, and you would like to loop through data sets
• When you would like to perform various calculations on your data and use Excel as a method of deriving the fields

Provar has Read and Write test steps to read data from an Excel sheet or a database and write data to an Excel spreadsheet.

This page describes how to configure Provar to test using data from Excel. You can also refer to Write Data Into Excel for more information.

To read from the Excel sheet, first, get your Excel file ready on your local machine.

Note: It is a good practice to save the file in the templates folder in your workspace.

Next, read the Excel file into your test case using Add Parameter Value Source. You can do this from any test step, but you will often find it helpful to do it on your For Each test step if you use one. (For Each is often used within Data-Driven Testing to iterate the same action through each data row.)

To read the Excel data into your Test Case, click the Add Parameter Value Source icon () in the top-right of the Test Step.

This will add the following new section to your Test Step:

You can populate this as follows:

Step 1: If you are on a Windows machine, navigate to your Excel file and highlight the range of cells you want to read into Provar. Then select CTRL+C to copy. Navigate to Provar and select the Populate From File icon (). This will populate the File, Worksheet, and Values Range fields.

Step 2: If you are using a Mac, you will need to populate File, Worksheet, and Values Range manually. Use File Chooser () icon to help you set the File path.

Step 3: In the Name field, select the orientation of the headers.

Step 4: In the Where field, specify any filter you want to be applied to the data being imported.

Step 5: In Variable, specify your preferred object name for the results (the default is ExcelData).

Step 6: Then parameterize the Test Case.

An example Excel spreadsheet with the corresponding Parameter Value Source parameters is populated below.

Add to Test Case

Once you have read the data from the Excel sheet, you need to use it in your test case. This is typically done using a For Each or While test step to loop through multiple rows and create a test step to make the data.

Step 1: Use Content Assist to access the fields in the SourceData object.

Step 2: Specify the list Name (e.g., SourceData) and the Value Name For Each test step. (The Value Name is the name for the current iteration.)

Step 3: Use the full stop to access the column headings.