Regex Extractor implementation

[Noga <na...@gmail.com>]

Hi JMeter devs,
First let me say a BIG THANK to all of  you guys for the tremendous product
you have created and -- doing a fabulous job of maintaining it.
In our firm ( D.E.Shaw & Co.) we use Jmeter extensively, even for
automation testing, not only for performance.

We have made some changes to the Jmeter sources to incorporate the
following:-
1.  Excel data reader -- relational data reader
2.  Pre processing for javascript so that other javascripts can be included
in another one
3.  Implementing array types using indices a[i] format

Obviously, as pure performance testing tool, these changes are not of much
value,
but while doing so, we have noticed one thing -- the way regex extractor
extracts arrays can be improved, instead of using get() we can probably use
getObject as default on JMeterVariables.java.
Also we wanted to check why put( ) function and putObject() function both
are needed.
Is it not possible to use put(String,Object) to do both? In the same line,
may be there was a type safety reason to put get() and getObject(), but
under the hood they do the same variables.gett() .

Due to this, we have to use _index to access elements of an array , which
can be easily done by making get() as getObject().

We do not want to change the existing implementation, that would break a
lot of code, we just want to append a newer way of accessing array type
variables in Extractors, particularly - Regex.

Please let me know if this sounds feasible. We have locally modified the
source, and it works.

And for Sebb, we do have a very extensive set of automated tests running in
Jmeter, make or break tests for our applications which covers a large
portion of the Jmeter functionality. So, we can probably run a sanity -
whenever newer JMeter build we want to release to public. But prior to that
I would do a code coverage test on Jmeter source to check how much code of
Jmeter we do cover while running those tests. I will keep you posted.
 We appreciate all the hard works you guys have done, at least this we can
definitely do for you all.


Thanks
--Noga