This blog will help you understand the important features of the Test Data Container (abbreviated as TDC) application used for testing your SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution using the Test Automation Tool.
At present SAP provides 23 standard Test Data Containers which the customers can leverage to supply data to their automated test scripts. In order to check which Standard automates are delivered along with Standard Test Data Containers, you can refer to the accelerator Standard Content Delivered API TDC UI Control Repository.xlsx (Public) under the task Edit Action Data and Change Visibility of Test Process in SAP Activate Roadmap viewer.
These standard TDC does not allow any modification to the fields of the Test Data Container.
Therefore, if a customer has certain custom fields in their application, the TDC application allows the customer to create their own custom TDC using fields from the templates and add custom fields to it.
Let’s get started with creating your own custom Test Data Container which can be used in multiple automates to supply you choice of variants and data.
1. Open the Test Data Container Application and click on the create button –
2. On the Create Test Data Container pop up screen, fill the mandatory fields and click on the Next button:
3. Select the template ( in this example select Sales Template ) and click on Next button:
4. Click on the Sales Template to view available fields. All the fields available for Sales template can be seen in middle of the screen. You can either choose all the fields or filter down the fields with respect to a particular scope item. ( In this example let’s filter down w.r.t scope item BD9- Sell From Stock)
5. Search and select the scope item. Click on Apply button.
6. Only the fields related to that particular scope item gets displayed. You can either choose relevant fields or can select all fields. If you have any custom fields in your application click on Add Custom Fields.
Note: Before adding the custom fields to the Test Data Container, the custom fields should be first maintained in the system. This can be done using the Manage Custom Fields where the user can add the fields to the TDC field repository.
7. Add custom fields ( if any ) and click on Finish.
Now, you can successfully created a custom Test Data Container and added custom fields to the same.
Let’s focus on other useful features of the application –
Download and Upload Test Data Container With/Without Variants in an excel file:
1. Open the TDC application, search for the TDC which you want to download and select the radio button to select the TDC ( in this example we are selecting Billing and Invoicing) TDC
2. Click on the download button-
3. You will get a pop to confirm, whether you want to download the TDC With Variants or Without Variants. If you choose with Variants, it will download the TDC with all the variants associated to it and you only need to input the values for respective Field Labels.
4. For this example, we will download the TDC using the option With Variants. You will notice that the excel which gets downloaded will have different sheets with the same of the Variants associated.
The Column named as Field Value highlighted in green will be allowed to edit and fill in your values.
5. Once you have completed filling all required values in the excel, save the excel and use the upload functionality in the TDC application to upload a new Test Data Container.
6. You new TDC will be uploaded with the 2 variants as filled in the excel-
This feature allows customers to prepare their Test Data Container from an already existing Test Data Container using its variants and can edit multiple variants at the same place in excel.
Talking about variants, let look at one more similar feature of-
Download and upload a variant using an excel file
1. Open the TDC application, search for the TDC whose variant you want to download ( in this example we are selecting Billing and Invoicing TDC).
2. Click on the arrow to go inside the TDC
3. Select the variant which you want to download and change values using the excel file, click on the download button and select OK to confirm download
4. In the Variants excel, this time you will only find one Variant_data sheet to edit that variant values-
5. Fill in the required values, save the excel. Use the Upload button to upload you excel in the variants section-
6. Your new variant ( eg: DE Variant ) will be created for the particular Test Data Container-
This functionality helps the customers to create a variant using an excel file.
The above features will also help you to Prepare for your Post Upgrade Testing by setting up your data in the Test Data Container application.
