A number of people have asked about how to set up a session profile for a device which is primarily sending TL1 responses. This article should help in dealing with TL1 devices.
There are two types of TL1 interfaces:
1. Automation interface which is not meant for human interaction. These interfaces do not produce a prompt for a human to interact with the device. Sometimes these interfaces may not even echo what user is typing.
2. Hybrid TL1 interface - these kind of interfaces echo what user is typing and give user a prompt. The prompt can simply be a normal prompt like "login:" or "mydut>" or could be TL1 end of message "<" or ";"
In both these cases, this is how you will set up your TL1 session profile:
1. Set the style on your telnet session profile to "TL1".
2. Set the default completion rule in your session profile to "TL1_EOM" (TL1 end of message).
Now if your device is of type #1, nothing else has to changed for steps in your testcase.
If you device is of type #2, there will be certain steps which are not going to be TL1. For these steps, you will need to change the completion rule to "AUTO AND IDLE" i.e. the rule which indicates that iTest needs to wait for a prompt.
If your step has both a TL1 message body and a prompt, you should keep the completion rule unchanged i.e. it should still be TL1_EOM. In addition, as long as you have prompts defined in your session profile, iTest will check that TL1 message is complete and there is a prompt match. This implies that if for a certain step, you do not get a prompt, you should change the prompt properties to inherit prompts from the session. This forces iTest to only check for TL1_EOM on these steps as there are no prompts defined for that step.
For #2, depending upon how many steps in your testcase need the change to "AUTO AND IDLE", you may or may not be better off in changing the session profile default to "AUTO AND IDLE" and changing the steps which have TL1 message bodies so that their completion rule is "TL1_EOM".
