Another day - another feature discovered

I've been getting ready to test a website that is being optimised for mobile technologies. To test this I've been using Safari 5, where you can spoof the User-Agent to be iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, and also Firefox with the excellent add-on of User Agent Switcher.

Both of these allowed me to see how the site was coming along - but when it came to recording for my load tests I had to think for a moment.

I've always just used Internet Explorer in VUgen, but now the super smarts of the website under test would detect it and... show the main website - not the mobile optimised site.

Not to worry - I installed Safari 5 and changed the settings in the recording options to use Safari instead.... No worries.

I already knew that I could set the User-Agent in the Runtime settings - but I wasn't to pleased with this as it is a little hit or miss as to whether someone checks them all before running.

Not to worry - I extended the use of the web_add_header which I have previously used for testing the website with and without HTTPZip compression.

So just by adding :

web_add_header("User-Agent","Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543 Safari/419.3");

I was able to programmatically test as if I was an iPhone.

This pleased me and allowed me to run my tests , now I just need to figure out how to get Xenu Link Sleuth to pretend to be an iPhone too!