About Extraction Rules

Extraction rules help verify that a Web application is working correctly by extracting data from the responses to Web requests. Extraction rules store results in the test context as name value pairs. Extraction rules can extract form fields, text, attributes, headers, regular expressions, and hidden fields.

Validation rules are similar to extraction rules, but instead of extracting data, they validate the existence of data. For more information, see About Validation Rules.

Predefined Extraction Rules

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers includes the following predefined extraction rules:

Extraction Rule Type Description

Extract Attribute Value

Extract the value of an attribute from a specified HTML tag.

Extract Form Field

Extract the value of a specified form field in the response.

Extract HTTP Header

Extract the value of an HTTP header.

Extract Regular Expression

Extract text from the response matching a regular expression.

Extract Text

Extract text from the response.

Extract Hidden Fields

Extract all hidden fields from the response.

Custom Extraction Rules

Visual Studio Team Edition for Testers provides predefined extraction rules in the form of classes in the Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.Rules namespace. However, you can create your own custom extraction rules by deriving from the ExtractionRule class. For more information, see How to: Create a Custom Extraction Rule.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Add an Extraction Rule to a Web Test
How to: Create a Custom Extraction Rule
Walkthrough: Adding Validation and Extraction Rules to a Web Test

Reference

Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.Rules
ExtractionRule

Concepts

About Validation Rules