Wednesday, 31 July 2024

Low Code testing with Playwright - 1. Intro Exercise (15 min)

Exercise 1.  Install and setup you first Playwright Test

1. Verify VS Code is installed 
2. Ensure the Microsoft Playwright Extension is installed (use the default language TypeScript)
 
3. Create a folder using Windows Explorer as shown here: C:\Users\paulb\source\repos\Playwright\Mendix

4. Open the folder in VS Code and ensure the project is initialised C:\Users\paulb\source\repos\Playwright\Mendix> npm init playwright@latest --yes -- --quiet --browser=chromium --browser=webkit

5. Verify your screen looks similar to this...




Exercise 2.  Record and run your first Playwright test

1. On the "Testing" area, select "Record new"


2. The recorder opens, type in a url in my case I used "https://www.paulbeck.co.uk"


3. Click and assert text exists on the page

4. Stop the recorder and close the browser.

5. Run the test, as shown below, validate the result

Sunday, 21 July 2024

Simple comparison of Cloud Storage options

Azure offers 3 main options for storing files:

Azure File Store (Supports SMB, no version control)

Azure Blob Storage (No SMB, has version control via apis, tiers for archiving)

Azure Data Lake Storage -Gen2 (No SMB, no versioning), more relevant to Big data/DataLake

 

AWS also has options to consider:


Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), similar to Azure Blob Storage with an API and tiers

Amazon FSx, similar to Azure File Store, supports SMB and NFS

Amazon Elastic Block Store (ESB) supports NFS


Office 365/SharePoint Archive option:

https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365-archive/

Extra SPO/O365 storage costs about $0.20/GB per month, using the SP Achieve service cost 0.05$/TB per month.  Also you only get changed for what you use, no pre-provisioned size.  Security & compliance is maintained so for old data needed to be archive this is a great easy option.

Sunday, 7 July 2024

PowerAutomate Flow to populate a word document table with Dynamic Rows

Overview: I recently needed to generate a dynamic table within word using Power automate, there are lots of resources out there to do it.  I found the order I did the core steps in determines if the process works so thought I'd blog this as a reminder and simple guide.

Objective: Use a flow to build an dynamic array and display the output within a Word document.

Steps

1. Create a new Flow in Power Automate (here I am initialising an array but you can build this up as you need too.  The Select option and nested actions allow for creating most required data sets)


2. Create a Word document for the template (in my scenario, I've created the MS word document inside a SharePoint Document library, as shown below)

3. Edit the word Document to Display the dynamic Rows (you need to edit in the Word app not the browser version of word).  
  • Add/Insert a Table (mine needs three columns)

  • Ensure you have the "Developer" ribbon setup and give the focus to the position where the fist dynamic field is needed.

  • Insert the "Plain Text Content Control" within the table at the desire places
  • Add the "key" name from the array to each plain text control as shown below:


  • The word document should looks as shown below.  Save and close the docx file.