Report generation code in Load Runner 9.5

Recently was working on a LoadRunner script that needed to generate and download a report and the requirement was that it should not take more than 5 minutes to generate the report.

Manually testing the report generation, I noticed that on completion a "Report Generated" text wa displayed. Therefore, I wrote following LR Code to wait for report to generate and raise an error message if it takes more than 5 minutes to generate the report.

ReportGeneration()
{   
int ReportGenerationTimeout = 300; // 5 minutes report gen timeout
long StartTime;
...
time(&StartTime);  //save the time into StartTime 
do
 {   //execute this code while Report Generated Text is not found
  lr_think_time (5); 
  
  web_reg_find("Text=Report Generated",
      "Search=Body", 
      "SaveCount=ReportGeneratedCount",
      LAST);

  web_submit_data("GenerateReport", 
     "Action={URL}/xxx/xxx.xx", 
     "Method=POST",
     "RecContentType=text/html", 
     "Referer={URL}/xxx/xxxcc.xx", 
     "Snapshot=t5.inf", 
     "Mode=HTML", 
     ITEMDATA, 
     "Name=ContinueButton", "Value=Continue", ENDITEM, 
     LAST);
 
    if ( (time(NULL) - StartTime) > ReportGenerationTimeout) //check if the report generation time is more than 5 minutes
    {
     lr_error_message("Report took more than 5 minutes to generate. The user id is ", lr_eval_string("{UserName}"));
     Logout();  //execute logout function
     lr_exit(LR_EXIT_ITERATION_AND_CONTINUE,LR_AUTO);  //exit the current iteration 
     and start next one
     }

  } while (atoi(lr_eval_string("{ReportGeneratedCount}")) == 0);
    ...
  return 0;
}

Description:
- The ReportGeneration function defines two variables, ReportGenerationTimeout and StartTime.
-ReportGenerationTimeout is the report generation maximum time
-StartTime saves the time before the code that generates the report is executed.

- {URL} and {UserName} are LR parameters.

-The while loop checks for the text ="Report Generated" from the server response. It continues executing the while loop until it either gets the text or 5 minutes timeout limit is reached.

-If it finds the text then it exits the loop and continues executing rest of the code.
-If the report is not generated within 5 minutes (IF condition) then log an error message with username for whom it did not generate the report, execute Logout function and exit the current iteration.

-time(NULL) function return the current time. For more on time function refer to
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/ctime/time/

Note:
-if you use lr_abort() function rather then lr_exit(...), you will end the execution. This will execute Vuser_end function. Depending on how you have set up your scenario you may want to stop the execution of script(lr_abort - this will stop virtual users and your load level will drop, that is what you want) or continue to next iteration(lr_exit) when the report timeout is met.

-You could also use lr_log_message() instead of lr_error_message(). This will avoid overloading the network. However it will depend how often you are sending the message. For more information refer to LR help on these functions.