mishmashmoo

If you have ever written a loadrunner script, you’d have noticed the actions on left of the window. Actions allow you to split your script up into logical components, which help with debugging, recording, and not to mention the benefits in analysis.
By default loadrunner gives you 2 actions, vuser_init, and vuser_end. they are only executed once per script, regardless of the amount of iterations, and they do just as their name implies, initialise and end the virtual user. You have the ability to add your own actions, delete, and rename them, anywhere in between vuser_init and vusier_end. And this is where our problem begins.

The error that you will encounter will not be apparent to you, until much later, and when you think you are ready to run 500 virtual users, you will be faced with an ugly problem, that is more annoying than anything else…

This problem will pop up for every single virtual user you are trying to load, before it initialises. So 500 virtual users = 500 error messages = 500 clicks on the “yes” button = annoying.
Even worse, if your ramp up time is something like 1 vuser every 30 seconds (a very generous ramp up) , that’s 15,000 seconds, which is over 4 hours of sitting at your screen clicking “yes”. Not my idea of good time utilisation.

The error occurs for the simple reason that you decided you had too many actions and decided to delete an action or rename an action while you were editing your script in Vugen. For some reason, some of the configuration files are not updated after deleting an action, and the old action names are recorded as part of the script. When the vuser is initialised in the controller scenario at run-time, the script reads one of the config files, which advises that “the following action(s) in script “blah” are no longer valid”, and that is when you are prompted to click “yes” to load the new script iteration settings.

I have tried numerous things to fix this, all which have failed. Creating a new script did not seem to work, apart from being extremely time consuming and annoying, its not ideal to re-setup my parameters and action names from scratch. Scouring the internet for this error proved totally useless, and my colleagues were also stumped as they faced this error in their careers which they were never really able to work around…Calling HP and raising a service request also did nothing.

Given that i had to load 1900 vusers in my current role, i didn’t want to sit in front of my PC for the entire duration of ramp up. I even pondered writing a script in ruby to click “yes” when it appeared, but I didn’t like the idea of a reactive solution, eliminating the error is always better than finding a solution for the error. So i went on a little hunt.

The solution
Lets cut to the chase. if you want to fix this problem easily and quickly without re writing your script. navigate to the folder where your script lies. In my example, its a remote server which is our sandbox where we store our scripts (as well as storing them in quality center, for obvious reasons).

Find a file called default.usp and edit it in your favorite text editor. I use ScITE which comes with ruby. You will notice a parameter called [Profile Actions].
That will list your actions. If you cross check this with the actions in your script you will notice that in my example, I only have 3 actions, whereas, the default.ups has 4.

It is clear, that the rogue action in my default.ups file is DVT. Simply delete it, save the file, refresh the script in your controller scenario (or close the scenario and reopen it to force refresh) and you can run your 500 users and walk away from your controller.

admin loadurnner invalid action