I’m hacking away at a tool to give me better JMeter results, and I needed to see progress as I iterated through the data I’d imported into MySQL.  The progress bar described in my earlier post can be made to work with a simple addition:

class Sequel::Dataset
  alias :size :count
end

This adds the necessary ’size’ method to Sequel’s dataset and everything’s happy.

I had a nagging feeling that I was missing a couple of posts after my wordpress death and subsequent server move. Last night I’d flushed that thought from my mind, but today I found out what they were, and thanks to Google’s cache, they’re back up again.

The first was a piece on implementing a moving progress bar for a Windows command prompt in Ruby.

The second was a solution to a JMeter documentation issue.

It’s nice to have them back, as they probably weren’t up long enough for anyone to read last time.

Now to find those comments…

After repeated issues trying to get what I thought would be a simple ‘If controller’ working in JMeter, it looks like my issue is to do with the poor examples on the JMeter site. Or else something is making my version and or/installation behave differently.

While the example provided on the JMeter site would have led me to use “${valid_data}”==”Y” as the Condition, with the ‘Interpret Condition as Variable Expression’ field unchecked, doing so was causing a silent failure.

After checking the log files, I could see this error:

“jmeter.control.IfController: missing ; before statement ”

After following some diagnostic advice that failed to work (the log function just seemed to repeatedly spit out my condition as a string, not evaluate it), and randomly experimenting with combinations, I still hadn’t managed to make it work as the log function was also seemingly not passing back the return value. So I removed it and then discovered that I’d somehow managed to make it work. The solution was to add a semicolon at the end:

“${valid_data}”==”Y”;

That was all it took. All good. Hope this helps someone.