Actions in QTP/UFT with Example

By : Thomas Hamilton Thomas Hamilton
Hours Updated

What is Action in QTP?

Actions help divide your test into “logical units” or “Business Processes”. Actions help create a script which is more modular and efficient.

When a script is newly created it consists of only one action. But you can add more Actions to your Micro Focus UFT Script as per requirements.

There two types of Actions

  1. Reusable Actions: can be used in other Tests. They can be used in the same Test Script multiple times.
  2. Non-Reusable Actions: cannot be used in other Tests. They can be called in the same script only once

At times, if an action becomes big, it’s a nice practice to split it. You can split an existing action in two ways

  1. Independent of each other which splits the selected action into two sibling actions
  2. Nested Action which splits the selected action into a parent action whose last step calls the second, child action

Actions can access test-data stored in datasheets. HP QTP provides 2 type of datasheets

  1. GLOBAL Datasheet: It is Unique for the entire test. Any Action can access and write data into Global Datasheet. A sheet is named “GLOBAL”
  2. LOCAL Datasheet: Equal to number of Actions in the sheet. An Action can read and write data into its own local Datasheet only. Sheet name = “ACTION NAME”.

The entire purpose of creating Actions is to use them in other Test Scripts. There are two methods to import Actions into a Test

  1. Call to COPY of an Action: When you make a Copy of an Action, the action is copied in its entirety, including checkpoints, parameterization, and the corresponding action tab in the Data Table into the calling test. When you insert a copy of an existing action, you can make changes to the copied action, and your changes will not affect nor be affected by any other test. You can insert copies of both reusable and non-reusable actions
  2. Call to an EXISTING Action: Calls to actions are read-only in the calling test. They can only be modified in the test in which they were created. Enables you to use the same action in several tests and makes it easy to maintain tests. You can make calls to only “Reusable” actions.

Following video tutorial demonstrates Actions. It uses the vanilla Test Script created in previous tutorials with 5 steps to log in into Flight Reservation. This tutorial is the longest in all QTP tutorials and it’s recommended you take notes while viewing it.

Click here if the video is not accessible

Just like Functions/Methods in programming languages you can also create input and output PARAMETERS for an action. This parameter has no relation with Test Data Parameterization learnt earlier.

If required you can use the following statement to exit an Action

  • ExitAction.
  • ExitActionIteration
  • ExitRun
  • ExitGlobalIteration

While executing a QTP script with Actions, you need to consider, Global Iterations & Local Iterations

You can change the action iteration frequency by selecting Action Call Properties > Run Tab