Hi Simon,

Parasoft SOAtest has been around since about 2007 and is an industry leader for API testing. It takes a design first approach to API test creation where users can use over 50+ drag-and-drop tools to build API test scenarios that include complex behaviors such as looping, data driving, assertions, and test flow logic. SOAtest supports over 150 message formats and protocols. Parasoft technology tends to be really cool and geeky and has awesome built in technology to support any type of API interaction. Take a look at this tech sheet

Parasoft has been innovating in the software test automation market for over 30 years and their solutions are designed to be easily brought into an organizations existing test infrastructure. Parasoft's solution leveraging AI and ML to enable both experienced and novice testers to save time creating meaningful and scalable test suites with optimized execution and analysis integrated into the CI/CD pipeline.

Parasofts key capabilities are as follows

Simplified artifact creation

Creating realistic test artifacts is complex. Parasoft simplifies the creation of four key artifacts:

API Tests: creation from ‘payload’, by inspecting API contracts (e.g. OpenAPI/Swagger, WSDL, etc.), monitoring how the API is used, and leveraging AI to create realistic test scenarios.

Web UI Testing: we provide the user with a simple entry point to selenium test creation through our authorship workflow. Enabling non-technical users to create true selenium tests

Test Data: monitoring data interactions between systems and building an intuitive data model that can be shared and controlled directly by the testing teams.

Service Virtualization: by monitoring the communications between system dependencies and applying sophisticated pattern-matching heuristics, Parasoft is able to quickly create reusable virtual assets to eliminate environmental constraints.

Reducing the cost of change

In testing, change (and maintenance of tests) is inevitable. Many organizations, especially Agile organizations, spend significant time and effort updating UI and API tests to account for changes.

Parasoft Selenic uses AI to discover failing locators in selenium tests due to application change and recommends new locators or automatically self-heals them during runtime execution

Change Advisor (a module of both Parasoft SOAtest and Parasoft Virtualize) alerts users across all Parasoft interfaces (e.g., desktop thick client, server, Web UI) when test or service virtualization assets have become out of sync with the corresponding API or service. Moreover, centralized change templates help users update all test and service virtualization assets quickly and intelligently

Flexible deployment options

Parasoft provides both a rich desktop IDE for power users and an intuitive thin-client interface for collaboration across the various personas within an organization’s testing practice.

The thin-client ecosystem promotes an environment-based approach to testing by bringing together all the test artifacts (test scenarios, virtual assets and safe test data) into a interactive visual diagram of the test environment that can both be configured for an individual’s use and leveraged as a template to enable dynamic environment configuration and deployment as part of CI/CD and cloud pipelines– enabling continuous testing anytime, anywhere

It sounds like you need to fill out some fields in the PDF, and then send the PDF somewhere. Filling out the fields will need to be done using a different application than SOAtest. You could then use the External Tool or Extension Tool in SOAtest to call that other application to make it part of your overall scenario.

Please use the echo.jsp provided with ParaBank. SOAtest includes a ParaBank example project which can be deployed locally. Alternatively, there is also the public deployment: http://parabank.parasoft.com/parabank/echo.jsp

The host ws1.parasoft.com is no longer publicly available. It has not been referenced in any documentation or tutorials since the SOAtest 9.8.0 release (Oct 24, 2014). The ParaBank demo application should be used instead.

@Ndey
you need to start with Testing from the Command Line Interface - soatestcli
There will be just one difference in commands to execute tests:

• in case that you want to execute one or selected TST in workspace, you have to include -resource option
• in case that you want to execute ALL TSTs in workspace, skip -resource option

Some examples of soatestcli call:

• command to execute all TSTs:
  soatestcli.exe -data "c:\APITest" -config "builtin://Demo Configuration"

• command to execute all TSTs but with non-default preferences:
  soatestcli.exe -data "c:\APITest" -config "builtin://Demo Configuration" -localsettingsmy_local.properties

• command to execute just one TST with non-default preferences:
  soatestcli.exe -data "c:\APITest" -config "builtin://Demo Configuration" -localsettings my_local.properties -resource "Login/Login.tst"
  In last case I have assumed that you have Login.tst in project folder called Login.
  In your case (as you want to run soatest using VBScript or batch file), call might looks like:
  VBScript template:

  Set oShell = CreateObject ("WScript.Shell")
  oShell.run "soatestcli.exe -data ""c:\APITest"" -config ""builtin://Demo Configuration"" "
  

batch file template:

    @echo off
    soatestcli.exe -data "c:\APITest" -config "builtin://Demo Configuration"

--
Ireneusz Szmigiel
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Here is a groovy script we use to decode and encode

import com.parasoft.api.*
import java.lang.*
import javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter;

public String Decode(input, context) {

//Pull the encoded base64 string into the script.
a = context.getValue("Generated Data Source", "Variable_Name");
Application.showMessage("Variable_Name: " + a)


//Decode the string.
decoded = new String(DatatypeConverter.parseBase64Binary(a));
Application.showMessage("Decoded: " + decoded)
assert decoded.contains('SUCCESS')

//Encode the string. This should match the original string you pulled in to the script.
encoded = new String(DatatypeConverter.printBase64Binary(decoded.getBytes()));
Application.showMessage("Encoded: " + encoded)

return

}

I'd recommend using java.util.Base64 over DatatypeConverter. A couple reasons:

• The Base64 class is the "new" way of doing this, introduced in Java 8 whereas DatatypeConverter is what you had to use in Java 7 and earlier.
• DatatypeConverter is also part of the JAXB API which was removed from the core Java API since Java 11. Using "Base64" is safer if you want this code to also work with newer versions of Java.