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How To –rerunfailed cases in robotframework and –merge the new output file

Introduction

Nowadays robot framework is getting used across inside many projects and testing domain i.e. UI testing (Selenium) , API testing ,DB testing, mobile testing(Appium) etc.

If you are curious or new to robot framework you can refer here https://automationlab0000.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/why-to-use-robot-framework/

Robot framework generates readable html reports after the complete execution of suites (collection of test cases). These reports will have

  1. output.xml
  2. log.html
  3. report.html

output.xml is mother of all the information which are captured during test execution’s, these contains many important information’s e.g.

1. Status of test cases

2. Status of keywords

3. Time taken for each TC\KWs and many more important information.

Apart from this, robot framework also provides rich cli options , one of the most used option is –rerunfailed

Why we need to rerun failed cases ?

In many suites, particularly in UI, there could be many error due to latentcy or intermmittent issue so if the pass count is less then 80% its problematic to share with the others when we know that failures are due to intermittent issues.

In those scenarios the best approach is to rerun the failed cases again.

How to run failed cases again

Lets start with code then , we have two test cases which can fail randomly

*** Settings ***
Library  String
*** Variables ***

*** Test Cases ***
verify odd number
    [Documentation]  This test case will fail if the number comes as odd number
    ${odd_number}  Generate Random Number
    ${Boolean}  Evaluate  ${odd_number}%2 == 0
    run keyword if  ${Boolean}  log to console  odd number  ELSE  Fail

verify even number
    [Documentation]  This test case will fail if the number comes as odd number
    Generate Random Number
    ${even_number}  Generate Random Number
    ${Boolean}  Evaluate  ${even_number}%2 == 0
    run keyword if  ${Boolean}  log to console   even number

*** Keywords ***
Generate Random Number
    ${PO_Number}    Generate random string    1    0123456789
    [Return]  ${PO_Number}

lets run the test with command

robot Odd_Even_Test.robot

Executing The Test Case

Robot framework generates one output.xml and 2 HTML file i.e. log.html , report.html. This output.xml is responsible for generation of these two html file and contains all the information related to executed automation code.

1 Failed TC

We will be using those information to get the list of failed cases and running them again using –rerunfailed options 

robot --rerunfailed "output.xml"  --output "rerun.xml" suite.robot

How to merge old and new xml

once the execution gets completed, you have the old ‘Output.xml” and new “rerun.xml” the next step would be to merge them so that you get a consolidated output using rebot command

rebot –merge output.xml rerun.xml

Here is the combined xml

Combined xml