Flattening Top-Level Keywords with Robot Framework API

This repository contains simple showcases of flattening the top level keywords of a test case using the Robot Framework API's Listener and the Result Visitor, as well as a third-party library for parsing XML.

Note

Examples are simplified for the purpose of the presentation at the RoboCon 2025 conference and should not be considered as final or recommended solutions.

1. Project structure

|—— Resources
|   |—— Common.resource               -- Resource file with common keywords
|   |—— RobotFrameworkWeb.resource    -- Resource file with specific keywords for web app
|—— Tests
|   |—— Search.robot                  -- Example of a test case for the search functionality
|—— Tools
|   |—— 01_Listener.py                -- Resource containing a simple custom listener
|   |—— 02_ResultVisitor.py           -- Script for modifying output.xml with a simple Result Visitor
|   |—— 03_XMLParser.py               -- Script for modifying output.xml with a third-party library

2. Installation

You can install the required dependencies into your Python by running the following commands from the repository root folder:

python -m venv .venv

.\.venv\Scripts\activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

rfbrowser init

After the inicialization of rfbrowser is done, you should be set to run the examples.

3. Running the examples

You can run the flattening examples in any order by running the following commands from the repository root folder.

Note

Examples may contain additional commands with rebot for the purpose of generating a new log.html where the results of the flattening can be easily observed.

3.1 Listener

robot -d Results --listener .\Tools\01_Listener.py Tests

rebot -d Results -o flattened_output.xml --flattenkeywords tag:robot:flatten Results\output.xml

We will end up with a new log.html file where the keywords from the second level and further are hidden.

3.2 Result Visitor

robot -d Results Tests

python .\Tools\02_ResultVisitor.py

rebot -d Results Results\flattened_output.xml

We will end up with a new log.html file where the keywords from the second level and further are hidden.

3.3 XML Parser

robot -d Results Tests

python .\Tools\03_XMLParser.py

rebot -d Results Results\flattened_output.xml

We will end up with a new log.html file where the keywords from the second level and further are hidden.

4. Contributions

You are welcomed to try your own experiments with the Robot Framework API in this project :-) If you have any suggestions for improvements or other ideas on how to dynamically flatten the top level keywords, feel free to share them via discussions, issues and so on.