Test random URLs from spreadsheet using alasql - node.js

Question

I have a large number of URLs within a xlsx file. What I'd like to do is randomly select some of these URLs, load them, then check that they return a status code of 200.
So I'm using the npm alasql package to do this.
At the moment, the following code successfully loads the first 5 URLs in the spreadsheet, checks that they 200, then finishes the test.
var alasql = require('alasql');
var axios = require('axios');
module.exports = {
'#tags': ['smokeTest'],
'Site map XML pages load': async (browser) => {
const result = await alasql.promise('select URL from xlsx("./testUrls.xlsx",{sheetid:"RandomUrls"})');
var xcelData = result.map(item => {
return item.URL;
});
async function siteMapUrlsTestArr(item) {
var response = await axios.get(browser.launch_url + item);
browser.verify.equal(response.status, 200);
console.log('Sitemap test URL =', (browser.launch_url + item));
}
for (let index = 0; index < xcelData.length; index++) {
if (index < 5) {
const xmlTestUrl = xcelData[index];
await siteMapUrlsTestArr(xmlTestUrl);
} else {}
}
},
'Closing the browser': function (browser) {
browser.browserEnd();
},
};
However, what I'd like to do is randomly select 5 URLs from the (large) list of URLs in the spreadsheet, rather than the first 5 URLs.
I appreciate that this will (probably) include using the Math.floor(Math.random() command, but I can't seem to get it to work no matter where I place this command.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Your logic is flawed. Here's how.
You want to select 5 random URLs from a list and then, perform the operation on the items but what you're doing is you're getting all the items and running the operation using a loop on first five.
To correct it:
//Fixed to five as you only want to test 5 URLs.
for (let index = 0; index < 5; index++) {
//Selecting a Random item from the list using Math.random();
const xmlTestUrl = xcelData[Math.floor(Math.random() * xcelData.length)];
//Performing the HTTP response operation on it.
await siteMapUrlsTestArr(xmlTestUrl);
}
The aforementioned solution will select a random item in each loop and perform the HTTP response operation on it. The items will be randomly selected using Math.random().