Advanced UFT 12 for Test Engineers Cookbook

Using a global dictionary for fast shared data access

Using a DataTable is a generally good practice because spreadsheet data is easy to create, visualize, and maintain. This is because MS Excel lies behind the DataTable, which is, as mentioned before, a wrapper to the Excel COM object. Other advantages of using the DataTable include its full integration with the test and action iterations mechanism and with the results report, in which one can visualize each iteration, along with the input data.

This is all good for the retrieval of input data that is prepared during design time. However, using the DataTable for sharing between actions has two main drawbacks during runtime:

• Repeated writes and reads may hinder performance when it comes to a large ...