Multi-level spidering in Badboy

I’m using Badboy version 2.0.7. In this version, Spider tool only handles one level of spidering. Spidering, in badboy is a feature that helps us navigate every link that is possible on a page.
I’ve heard that in badboy version 2.0.8, spidering will be enhanced and will be able to walk through every link on a page and also descend into the child pages.

For users who use 2.0.7 version, this is not possible. However, I’ve created a set of step with which we can implement the multi-level spidering in older versions too. This is done with the help of variables and steps(that can be iterated).

The step hierarchy of the solution is shown in the picture(This is not a general solution, its specific to my problem scenario. However, with little modification, it can be made useful in other specific situations).

However, this solution still has some limitations. First, The number of child steps needs to be known previously. That means it will not work if u want to go endlessly by clicking child of child and so on. For now, I know that piece of information, so its working fine for me.
Second, for every number of Loop step, we need to create 2 variables ‘gotoLink’ and ‘goBackLink’ with loop number appended at last.
I’ll try to find a way out the way by which we can avoid this necessity of knowing the number of child steps in advance.

Using Badboy for testing

Here, I don’t meant I’ll use some bad boys out there to test my script. What I’m saying is I’ll use badboy, a web testing tool, to test my script. 😛
Badboy makes testing web applications very easy with its capture/replay style testing tool. It captures the activities our browser is performing while we navigate our site. We can save the steps and do the load test by repeating same actions concurrently through many users.
Badboy can be a very essential tool for test automation, if we do testing or Quality Assurance work as it help us to record and play back tests of our web site or application.

We can also modify the parameters to different values in Badboy using Script Variables.
Also we can load values from any ODBC compliant database into Badboy to exhaustively test whole ranges of data values.

Badboy could be free or very cheap depending upon the licence agreement.

For more info:
http://www.badboy.com.au/
http://www.badboysoftware.biz/docs/report.htm
http://www.perfwolf.com/The_Load_and_Performance_Teste/Badboy/badboy.htm