When you want to run tests on multiple machines simultaneously, you connect to all the machines and then you direct specific test operations to particular machines. This enables you to drive different applications concurrently. For example, you can test the intercommunication capabilities of two different applications or you can drive both a client application and its server.
To do this, at the beginning of a test script you issue for each machine an explicit connection command. This can be either Connect(agent_name) or SetMachine(agent_name). This connection lasts for the duration of the script unless you issue a Disconnect(agent_name) command. In the body of the script you can specify that a particular portion of code is to be executed on a particular machine. The SetMachine(agent_name) command specifies that the following statements are directed to that Agent. You can specify that just one statement is directed to a particular Agent by using the bracket form of the machine handle operator. For example ["Client_A"]SYS_SetDir ("c:\mydir").
Since 4Test allows you to pass variables to these functions, you can write a block of code that sends the same operations to a particular set of target machines and you can pass the SetMachine function in that block of code a variable initialized from a list that specifies the machines in that set. Thus, specifying which machines receive which operations is very simple.