robot framework

There has been Robots (TM)

/ jankka / Leave a comment

 

We did have the (I suppose it was) first Robot Framework -related MeetUp in Sweden yesterday evening. It was held at the premises of Fareoffice Car Rental Solutions Ab in Kungsholmen.

There was not plenty of participants, but there was enough. The company and the office are small, so it was actually a good thing to have a ‘lagom’ crowd. Which in this case was 9 from outside the company, me, Pekka Klärck and 4 from Fareoffice.

First Pekka gave an introduction and background talk about Robot Framework. It was actually good to watch (for me), for I learned a few new things, once again. Even though he had held almost the same speech during the day before, while having a Robot Framework Workshop/training to Fareoffice, there still was few new issues to cover. Besides that we were talking about general usage of plug-ins on IDEs, RoboCon and running the tests with different setups.

The second was my trial of fire. I had a presentation about Robots in Containers. It went surprisingly smoothly. I had few technical glitches, but I knew they were there so the ghost of a demo-god did not ruin my presentation.

Of course there were few things I’d do differently. First of all, it was too quick. Secondly, I could’ve concentrated more on practical execution of the steps I was describing with  pictures; a live work is always better than preserved slide. Even if the deck of slides are be done with Prezi.

So it goes. I was tense, nervous and did all the typical flaws a Finn can do when representing and reflecting my MeetUp arrangements and presentation; I picked up all the mistakes I thought I had made. That is pretty much a built-in feature for us grown up in (the 80’s at least) Finland. Luckily, you can always trust a Swede to be there and comfort you. Empathy in Sweden is a strong and positive thing. Thank you for all participants for being there and for the support.

The best part of the MeetUp was the people and the discussions we had. It was great to see that there were others using Robot Framework here in Sweden.

I was also asked about running Selenium tests on IE/Edge, and we ended up showing the tests the way we do it; running them from Jenkins and in Browserstack. But that is not running on premise. Which meant I could not give a straight answer, which bugged me a bit, as usually. It started to feel kind of a challenge and I might want to pick it up on next creative Friday (once a month tradition at Fareoffice). So to say, spin up a Windows server and install Zalenium in it. Working with Windows would be a worthy challenge for me, an avid Linux -user as I am, and could serve as a good reminder on the fact that even the operating systems should be seen as tools. And every tool has its purpose.

In the end, we decided to create a MeetUp group and have the next meeting at Eficode’s premises in Stockholm. There was also few ideas about where to host RoboCon in 2019. All in all I am really happy I decided to push this one through, believe me, I had my doubts beforehand 😀

 

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Logstash filter for Robot Framework

/ jankka / Leave a comment

We are currently working on CI/CD -setup at work. As part of that, the tests need to be able to be implemented as a part of the pipeline.
Generally, the pipeline consists of steps/stages done with jenkins pipeline. The benefit on this is that the whole process and definition of the stages (Deploy, test etc) will be done by the developer team and stored in the teams own repository and is therefore controlled by the team also. Which is definitely a great step towards for the teams having more freedom and more responsibility when it comes to deliver the applications/solutions to the production. Needless to say it will also affect to the visibility of the quality and to the need of tests.

Plus that it will definitely keep the test team on their toes. Keeping ahead becomes a really neat challenge 😀

Now that does add more requirements also on the testing tools. First of all, the tools we use should be able to be used from containers. Which means that everything is dockerized. Well, the test code itself is in the repository, but the engines running the tests are in the containers.
We use, whenever we can, a general docker images from dockerhub.
Sometimes it won’t work like that. So we end up re-inventing the wheel.

That was the case with logstash. We will need to be able to filter the Robot Framework’s output.xml and send it to elasticsearch. There was two possibilities to do that; logstash filtering or xml parsing. The xml-parsing remains to be done still (I am going to do it), but I did manage to create the logstash -filter. It is not completely flawless, not even the most elegant, but at the moment it seems to be working as it should. To be honest, I was aiming to have a one more blunt instrument for our test needs.

The filter:

robot-results.conf

input {
 file {
 path => [ "/output.xml"]
 }
}

filter {
 xml
 {
 source => "message"
 store_xml => true
 target => "doc"
 xpath =>
 [

"msg", "doc.msg",
 "arguments", "doc.args",
 "kw", "doc.keyword",
 "status", "doc.status",
 "status/@status", "doc.test.status",
 "robot", "doc.robot",
 "errors", "doc.errors",
 "statistics", "doc.statistics",
 "suite", "doc.suite",
 "tag", "doc.tag",
 "total", "doc.total",
 "/kw", "leftovers",
 "/arguments", "leftovers"

]



}
}



output {
 elasticsearch {
 hosts => ["elastic"]
 index => "logstash-%{+YYYY.MM.dd}"
 }
}

Dockerfile:

FROM logstash

ADD robot-results.conf /etc/logstash/conf.d/robot/results.conf
CMD logstash -f /etc/logstash/conf.d/robot/

Running the container:

docker run --add-host=elastic:127.0.0.1 janmat/logstash-robot