One of the main features of rwloadsim is to generate random data and one way to do that is using random string arrays.
A random string array is a variable that will return a different value each time it is used in an expression. It contains a fixed number of entries, each having a string constant and a weight. Weights cannot be negative, their sum must be positive, and rwloadsim will scale them to probabilities in the range [0;1]. Here is a short example:
random string array maybe ( "yes" 20, "no" 70, "maybe" 10);
printline maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe;
This declares the variable “maybe” as a random string array with three entries. Whenever “maybe” is used in an expression, one of the three entries will be returned, and each entry will be returned with a certain probability. In this case, the weights are given as 20, 70 and 10, and because the sum of these is 100, these values effectively are percentages. A few executions of this might give:
no no maybe no no no no
no yes no no no no no
no no yes maybe no yes yes
See the file ovid2.rwl in the demo directory as an example.
Note that you cannot use a random string array as a bind parameter.