topic Re: Web Request Naming - Placeholder using regex in Open Q&A

Web Request Naming - Placeholder using regex

phalgun — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 10:21:25 GMT

I am trying to name web requests using Placeholder. I have two web requests variations that must be named in the same format. How do I achieve this? I tried the regex way but I am not able to make it possessive as lookbacks and lookaheads are not allowed in DT. OR is there a non-regex solution?

Original Web Requests

1. URL Path is /folder1/ws?serviceName=aBcD&methodName=xYz

2. URL Path is /folder1/ws?methodName=xYz&serviceName=aBcD

I need both of them to be renamed as 'Web Service - xYz'.

My solution was this:

Condition - URL Query contains 'methodName='

Placeholder - variable called MName, using URL Query, Regex extraction, regex string is methodName=([a-zA-Z]+). unfortunately this is greedy, so DT does not allow this. I need to 'match' the methodName= string, but it should not be in the result.

I cant use the before/after/between delimiter here since the position of the methodName changes.

Re: Web Request Naming - Placeholder using regex

ChadTurner — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 12:36:56 GMT

What if you add in the * for a value of methodName=([a-zA-Z]*+)

Re: Web Request Naming - Placeholder using regex

phalgun — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 14:11:29 GMT

Nice! that works! I was under the impression that both . and * are greedy and hence not allowed by DT. glad that * works.

Re: Web Request Naming - Placeholder using regex

ChadTurner — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 14:15:28 GMT

@phalgun I ran into the same issue with greedy quantifiers as well and kept looking and looking for a solution around the "+" I was extremely happy when I found that we could add the "*" to the + in order to negate the greedy classification

Re: Web Request Naming - Placeholder using regex

AbAmani — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 14:23:05 GMT

Thanks Chad! That worked for me too .

Re: Web Request Naming - Placeholder using regex

r_weber — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 14:50:38 GMT

You might want to try lookaround matches like this:

(?<=methodName=)[aA-zZ]*(?=\&)