Handling JSF ViewState errors using JMeter

Question

I'm facing an issue while running a recorded test scenario of an application login using a single user on JMeter.

I've used JMeter's proxy server to record all the requests of the login scenario. The proxy server records all the requests fine. When i play the recorded scenario, the login step gives response data that contains "Your session has expired". It seems that the JSF ViewState value is getting hard-coded when I record the requests due to which when the steps are played the new ViewState values generated from the server do not match.

I tried using solutions given in these links to handle ViewState values:

• Testing a JSF Application with JMeter
• How to handle JSF viewstate with jmeter
• JMeter handling dynamic ViewState parameter in Seam framework
• How to modify JMeter scripts which handle JSF ViewState?.

But still it doesn't work.
Am i missing something?
Or is it something other than the ViewState that's causing the recorded steps to fail?

Screenshots below:

screen #1

screen #2

screen #3

Answer 1

1) You have to extract viewState value BEFORE the usage.
I.e. if you send viewState value along with login-request so you have to extract this value from response to PREVIOUS request.

Thread Group
    HTTP Request 01 : /login GET
        XPath Extractor : extract jsfViewState
    HTTP Request 02 : /login POST (send previously extracted jsfViewState as param)
        XPath Extractor : extract jsfViewState for next request
    . . .

2) You are extracting viewState to the variable ${Var_ViewState} (screen #1) but refer it as ${ViewState} (screen #3).
Be careful.

3) In your XPath Extractor (screen #1) you have to check Use Tidy (tolerant parser) checkbox on the element's control panel - since you are using xpath against html, not xml (presume that some kind of warning should also appear in jmeter.login this case).

XPath query itself looks good, although string() is redundant.

4) Add HTTP Cookie Manager to your test-plan to handle session variables (jsessionid).

Answer 2

Just one change worked for me Jmeter 2.13.

In Screen 1 change ${Var_ViewState} to ${jsfViewState}
since you are using ${ViewState} in Screen 2 change that to ${jsfViewState}

Note

1. Checking Tidy (tolerant parser) doesn't work.
2. my xpath query was string(//input[@id='javax.faces.ViewState']/@value)
3. I used the jmeter proxy recording to generate the test plan. https://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/jmeter_proxy_step_by_step.pdf
4. No changes were made on the encoding on the recorded script
5. Change the javax.faces.ViewState parameter to ${jsfViewState} in all the recored files.