During a recording, Testimony will capture any user transactions that download files to a user’s local desktop. In order to avoid potentially flooding the bot machines with downloaded files, Testimony virtualises these file downloads during the playback, intercepting the calls to the download functions in SAP and instead “masking” them to make SAP think that the file has been successfully downloaded.
In most cases, when a file is downloaded to the desktop a message of message class FES is displayed. (For example, message FES028 “200 bytes passed”). Because we know that we will not actually be downloading a file (and therefore that no FES message will be displayed) we use part of the message exclusions functionality to automatically pass steps that, in the recording, displayed one of these messages.
Unfortunately, SAP is not always consistent in its use of FES messages. In some transactions a generic message (00001) is used. This is a “catch-all” message that can be passed up to eight variables, but has no fixed text. Although it would be technically possible within Testimony to bypass this message, it is not desirable to do this as we cannot be certain under what circumstances it will be displayed.
Because of this, there will be cases where transactions that download files to the local desktop cannot be played back correctly.
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