Robot Framework API documentation — Robot Framework 7.2.2 documentation (original) (raw)
This documentation describes the public API of Robot Framework. Installation, basic usage and wealth of other topics are covered by the Robot Framework User Guide.
If you have questions related to the APIs, you can ask them on Robot Framework Slack, Forum or mailing list. If you encounter bugs, please submit an issue.
Entry points
Command line entry points are implemented as Python modules and they also provide programmatic APIs. Following entry points exist:
- robot.run entry point for executing tests.
- robot.rebot entry point for post-processing outputs (Rebot).
- robot.libdoc entry point for Libdoc tool.
- robot.testdoc entry point for Testdoc tool.
See built-in tool documentation for more details about Rebot, Libdoc, and Testdoc tools.
Public API
robot.api package exposes the public APIs of Robot Framework.
Unless stated otherwise, the APIs exposed in this package are considered stable, and thus safe to use when building external tools on top of Robot Framework. Notice that all parsing APIs were rewritten in Robot Framework 3.2.
Currently exposed APIs are:
- logger module for libraries’ logging purposes.
- deco module with decorators libraries can utilize.
- exceptions module containing exceptions that libraries can utilize for reporting failures and other events. These exceptions can be imported also directly via robot.api like
from robot.api import SkipExecution. - interfaces module containing optional base classes that can be used when creating libraries and other extensions. New in Robot Framework 6.1.
- parsing module exposing the parsing APIs. This module is new in Robot Framework 4.0. Various parsing related functions and classes were exposed directly via robot.api already in Robot Framework 3.2, but they are effectively deprecated and will be removed in the future.
- TestSuite class for creating executable test suites programmatically andTestSuiteBuilder class for creating such suites based on existing test data on the file system.
- SuiteVisitor abstract class for processing testdata before execution. This can be used as a base for implementing a pre-run modifier that is taken into use with
--prerunmodifiercommandline option. - ExecutionResult() factory method for reading execution results from XML output files andResultVisitor abstract class to ease further processing the results.ResultVisitor can also be used as a base for pre-Rebot modifier that is taken into use with
--prerebotmodifiercommandline option. - ResultWriter class for writing reports, logs, XML outputs, and XUnit files. Can write results based on XML outputs on the file system, as well as based on the result objects returned by the ExecutionResult() or an executed TestSuite.
- TypeInfo class for parsing type hints and converting values based on them. New in Robot Framework 7.0.
- Languages and Languageclasses for external tools that need to work with different translations. The latter is also the base class to use with custom translations.
All of the above classes can be imported like:
from robot.api import ClassName
The public API intends to follow the distributing type information specificationoriginally specified in PEP 484.
See documentations of the individual APIs for more details.
Tip
APIs related to the command line entry points are exposed directly via the robot root package.
All packages
All robot packages are listed below. Typically you should not need to import anything from them directly, but the above public APIs may return objects implemented in them.
- robot package
- robot.api package
- robot.conf package
- robot.htmldata package
- robot.libdocpkg package
- robot.libraries package
- robot.model package
- robot.output package
- robot.parsing package
- robot.reporting package
- robot.result package
- robot.running package
- robot.utils package
- robot.variables package