A message-based stub is essentially an IBM® Rational® Integration Tester resource
that listens for incoming messages on a particular transport. A stub
can reply to specific messages or message-types, matched according
to incoming filters, by using message case actions.
Benefits of stubs
Message-based stubs enable
you to simulate services that you are unable to use or that may otherwise
be unavailable.
For example, if you are testing a TIBCO BusinessWorks
process but you do not always have access to TIBCO Designer, you can
record the process events, create a stub from them, and then run the
stub in place of TIBCO Designer.
Stubs can use most Rational Integration Tester transports
and schemas, including CHIPS, COBOL Copybook, Fedwire, FIX, SWIFT,
and XML.
For example, a stub may be subscribed to an IBM WebSphere® MQ message
queue waiting for messages to arrive or it could be a web service
waiting for a SOAP message to arrive over an HTTP connection.
Note: Some Rational Integration Tester transports
cannot be used in stubs.
Note: If you are using Rational Integration Tester 8.0.1
or later, you can create REST-based stubs. Specifically, you can extract
information from URLs and make the information available as tags in
stubs, and Rational Integration Tester will
generate a REST schema.
Levels of richness
A message-based stub
can be simple or rich. For example, you might want to simulate a single
service that uses a single message case and the default case. Alternatively,
you might want to simulate a web service or some other point-to-point
operation that includes multiple message-types or operations.
The
basic principles for simple and rich message-based stubs are the same
because a specific reply is sent when a specific message-type is received,
but there are some important differences:
- A simple message-based stub will receive a message and (optionally)
validate its contents. Based on the validation results or the fact
that the message was received, the stub can return some static response,
for example, a simple log action, a reply message, and so on.
- In contrast, a rich message-based stub can receive incoming messages
and, based on the specific contents of those messages, execute out
a more extensive set of actions. For example, it might look up data
in a database or spreadsheet, update one or more records in a database,
use failure paths, and so on. Through the use of message cases and
other actions, a stub can be configured to generate responses in an
intelligent manner.