In this blog post, let us see what's new in Apache JMeter 5.6. You can check my last post about JMeter 5.5. JMeter 5.6 was long due from the Apache community, it has been more than a year since we got an update.

Apache JMeter 5.6

There are no new and noteworthy changes in JMeter 5.6. But it comes with improvements and bug fixes. The following are the improvements made in JMeter 5.6.

Thread Groups

• Issue #5682Pull request #717 - Open Model Thread Group: avoid skipping rows from CSV Data Set Config
• Support custom thread group implementations in "Add think time" and "Save as test fragment" actions
• Open Model Thread Group: interrupt pending HTTP requests and other Interruptible test elements on test stop

HTTP Samplers and Test Script Recorder

• Pull request #5911 - Use Caffeine for caching HTTP headers instead of commons-collections4 LRUMap
• Pull request #5947 - Fetch resources referenced in <link "rel"="preload"...> elements
• Pull request #5869 - Allow more templates to format sampler names in the recorder: #{url}, #{method}, #{scheme}, #{host}, #{port}

Other samplers

• Pull request #5909 - Use Caffeine for caching compiled scripts in JSR223 samplers instead of commons-collections4 LRUMap

Apart from the above improvements, there are general enhancements available in 5.6 along with non-functional changes such as JARs upgrades, accessibility, and more.

I have a surprising feature in JMeter 5.6 for you, which is editable in almost all the checkbox controls. This was not possible prior to JMeter 5.6.

By default, the checkbox has two attributes: either checked or unchecked. But starting from JMeter 5.6, you can enable the expression so that you can programmatically control the attributes.

Here is how you can edit the checkbox properties.

• Right-click on the checkbox where you want to add the expression as shown below.

• Click "Use Expression" This will launch a drop-down as shown below.

• Here you can select true to enable the checkbox, false to uncheck the checkbox, or you can use either the expressions ${__P(property_name)} or ${variable_name}

__P can be used to read the values from the JMeter CLI. ${} can be used to read within the JMeter test plan.

Checkbox expressions usecases

You may think where this feature will be useful. Actually it has various usecases:

• Test different thread groups consecutively.
• to test various HTTP sampler settings such as keep alive, multi-form data, headers, and more.
• Test various thread group properties

Download Apache JMeter 5.6