When trying to export test cases from Agile Requirements Designer to ALM, I am receiving errors such as 'ALM has failed' and 'Bulk operation failed'.
Actions Taken:
ARD 2.10 and earlier
CA Agile Requirements Designer
The root cause of this issue was an ALM limitation.
ALM was not accepting certain special characters in the Title/Test Case Name field.
For example: ?,'/!
The reason you do not receive a message with this information specifically is that the ALM APIs are limited, and do not provide a sufficient error message for the problem.
You may also receive this error message if your Title/Test Case Name is too long.
There is a character limit in ALM which can be increased or decreased by your ALM administrator.
We found the issue by copying/pasting the test case name into the Title field in ALM.
If you test the title names from within ALM, you will receive a specific error message.
Development is currently working on an enhancement to improve this ALM limitation.
In the meantime, here are some workarounds that can be used:
Option #1
- When creating new test cases, do not add any special characters in the 'Name' field, but instead, add them in the 'Description' field.
- For example:
Name: Have Water
Description: Have Water?
Option #2
- Before exporting your test cases in Path Explorer, remove the special characters from the test case name.
Option #3:
- In your ALM mappings/configuration, under the Description field's AgileDesigner Field Name, change the drop down option to 'Description of Blocks'.
- When you export to ALM, in the description field, you will see all the titles/names of blocks as is with the special characters included.
- This will not be in the main title in ALM, but at least the real titles with special characters will be available in ALM.