Robocop 2.5.0

Several changes to our spacing and comments rules and also initial suppport for Robot Framework 5.1 features such as languages or AS markers.

Robot Framework 5.1 support

Language markers

Robocop now supports reading the Robot Framework files in different languages
using --language option. More details in our docs (#646).

WITH NAME deprecated in favour of AS

Alias for library import can be now defined using AS marker (same as in Python).
WITH NAME will be gradually deprecated in the future Robot Framework versions.
That's why we added support for AS marker to existing rules and created new
rule deprecated-with-name which will warn on WITH NAME usage starting from RF 5.1 (#642).

Empty lines handling refactor (#708)

We changed how we're recognizing the empty lines in spacing rules.
Previously consecutive-empty-lines, empty-lines-between-keywords and empty-lines-between-test-cases
rules ignored comments. This lead to suprising behaviours, for example following code reported three empty lines
between keywords:

*** Keywords ***
Keyword
    Pass

    # comment 1

# comment 2

Second Keyword
    Pass

Detecting end of the keyword / test was also not working correctly (in above example # comment 1 should belong
to Keyword and do not count towards empty lines between keywords).
consecutive-empty-lines now also works inside IF, FOR, WHILE and TRY blocks.

Configurable todo-in-comment

New markers parameter in todo-in-comment rule that allows to define your own
markers that should be reported when found in the comment (#674).

Configurable block comments in missing-space-after-comment

New block parameter in missing-space-after-comment rule that allows to define
pattern for block comments that should be ignored by the rule (#689)

Keywords inside run keywords are now parsed

Keywords inside keywords like Run Keywords or Run Keyword If are now recognized
and handled by keyword rules (#691, #520).

Fixes

• too-few-calls-in-test-case now properly count keywords inside templated tests.
  It is now also possible to ignore templated tests in too-few-calls-in-test-case rule
  with ignore_templated parameter (#685)
• too-few-calls-in-test-case and too-few-calls-in-keyword now counts new RF 5.0 syntax (such as
  RETURN or BREAK statements). The code inside IF, FOR, WHILE and TRY blocks is now
  also recognized by those rules (#704)
• several naming rules now reports with more precise location (#290)
• duplicated import name now acknowledge the aliased name (#699)
• external rules are now properly loaded from installed Python module (#709)
• critical failures in Robot Framework that cause Robocop to stop working are now wrapped with more
  user friendly message (#586)

Acknowledgements

Big thanks to everyone:
@ger-kil, @Lucas-C, @antonpaa and @UliSei for raising issues and helping to improve
our documentation.
@rikerfi for extending our comment rules

Robocop 2.4.0

Several improvements and fixes for Robocop reports & first updates for upcoming Robot Framework 5.1 release. Rule severity can be also be dynamic depending on the rule other parameters.

Reports improvements & fixes

• Not all reports will be generated when using --reports all option. Some reports were internal only or produced files which may be not desired. Reports that are not enabled by all and only with specific mention (ie --reports sarif) are marked in our docs (reports docs) (#662)
• It is possible now to change order of the reports in the output using --reports option. Before this release reports were generated in order they are implemented in Robocop code. Now if typu configure --reports x,y then first report x and then report y will be generated. You can also combine it with all if you only want one report at the top and rest in default order: --reports x,all (#664)
• Invalid report name will now fail and suggest alternative if you made a typo - previously invalid report name was silenty ignored. For example it was possible to configure --reports timestamps (instead of timestamp) and user was not aware of it (#665)

Sarif report

Robocop can now generate report in sarif format. This format is accepted by various CI platforms as result of code scanning and can be used to integrate into Github CI (more details in our docs) (#638)

Configurable rule severity

It is now possible to configure rule to report with different rule severity depending if the rule exceed given thresholds (#614).
For example if you want line-too-long rule to issue warning on lines above 120 characters long and error on lines longer than 200 character you can configure it using severity_threshold:

robocop -c line-too-long:line_length=120 -c line-too-long:severity_threshold:warning=120:error=200

More on the feature in our docs.

too-few-calls-in-test-case rule

New rule too-few-calls-in-test-case. If the test case have less that allowed number of keyword calls (1 by default) it will report an error.

Other

• Replaced toml with tomli library (for parsing our configuration files). tomli library was selected to be part of Python vendored-in libraries in future Python release (#609)
• Handle new reserved tags in Robot Framework 5.1 (#660)
• You can ignore documentation in too-long-test-case and too-long-keyword rules with new ignore_docs parameter (False by default) (#613)
• Relative paths in the pyproject.toml configuration file are now resolved using configuration file parent directory as parent (and not using tool current working directory which lead to unexpected behaviour) (#612)

Acknowledgements

Big thanks to @ds-dustenharrison, @bollwyvl, @adrszad, @ZephyrusMB, @phermann-DGL, @rikerfi for raising the issues and providing the feedback.

Robocop 2.3.0

New report and small fix.

Timestamp report

Report that returns Robocop execution timestamp (#628 #637). Example:

Reported: 2022-07-10 21:25:00 +0300

Handle comments with separators inside

When comment in Robot Framework contains more than one space of separator inside, it is recognized as two separate comments under the hood. It lead to a few small bugs when processing such comments - it is now resolved (#634).
Additionally block comments (starting with ###) are now ignored by missing-space-after-comment rule.

Acknowledgements

Big thanks to @MoreFamed , @UliSei for raising the issues and @rikerfi for implementing the timestamp report.

Robocop 2.2.0

Updates to rule severity and threshold handling.

• Fixed the bug where the overriden rule severity wasn't taken into account by reports (#623)
• Threshold severity can be now configured the same way the rule severity is configured (#624)
• Invalid threshold value now raises an error instead of silently using INFO severity (#624)

Other

Updated Robocop python requirements to ">=3.6". The requirement did not change but we were missing this data in our metadata (#621).

Acknowledgements 💪🏻

@UliSei for raising the issues regarding our rule & threshold severity

Robocop 2.1.0

This release is purely created by the community - big thanks!

Version Report

New report added by @rikerfi (#616). It will print Robocop version at the end of the scan:

Report generated by Robocop version: 2.1.0

You can configure it using "all" or "version":

robocop --reports version src

Naming rules changes

Update to some of our naming rules done by @jannek76 (#615).

• wrong-case-in-keyword-name rule received a new parameter: pattern. It allows you to define pattern that will be ignored from the keyword name. It's useful when Robocop doesn't detect the name of the keyword correctly (it works as a workaround for #595).

• not-allowed-char-in-name split to not-allowed-char-in-name (which now covers test case and keyword names) and not-allowed-char-in-filename (which now covers suite names). Same as the original rule, not-allowed-char-in-filename also accepts patern that defines which characters are not allowed in a name. This split allows you to configure patern separately for suite and test/keyword names.

Acknowledgements 💪🏻

Big thanks to everyone!
@jannek76 For improving our (not-so-simple) naming rules
@rikerfi For adding new report

2.0.2

Robocop 2.0.2

This 2.0.2 release 🎉 includes fixes for various parts of Robocop 🤖 and improves documentation 📖. Thanks everyone for finding the issues 🐞 and reporting them back to us!

Fixes 🐛

• Fixed rule W0319 (deprecated-statement) which reported deprecation on [Return] statement in RF4 (#589, #590)
• Rule W0901 (keyword-after-return) no longer reports warning on [Return] not being the last statement when [Teardown] is used at the end of the keyword (#588, #591)
• Updated rule W0302 (wrong-case-in-keyword-name) to better handle parenthesis used in keyword and test case names (#558, #596)
• Updated rules W1004 (empty-lines-between-test-cases) and W1005 (empty-lines-between-keywords) to allow comments between keywords and test cases in corresponding sections (#513, #599)
• Fixed rule W0319 (deprecated-statement) to show deprecation message for Run Keyword Unless keyword only in RF5 (#593, #598)
• Updated message for rule W0302 (wrong-case-in-keyword-name) to "Keyword name '{{ keyword_name }}' does not follow case convention" to properly reflect what's being checked (#548, #600)
• Updated rule I0912 (empty-variable) to properly mark variable type in recommendations for empty values (#592, #597)
• Fixed rule W0202 (missing-doc-test-case) to not report on every test case when templated suite is used.
  Also, a new parameter ignore_templated (set to True by default) is introduced to configure whether the rule should report on missing documentation for each templated test case or not (possible values are: Yes / 1 / True (default) or No / False / 0) (#526, #602)

Other 📈

• Updated examples in documentation (README and User Guide) (#601)
• Added examples in reports documentation (#601)
• Robocop can now correctly say if a noun is plural or singular (e.g. 2 rules instead of 2 rule(s)) (#601)
• Fixed small typos in documentation, docstrings and sorted imports in code (#603)
• Removed repo visualization file (due to problems with related GitHub action) (#607)

Acknowledgements 💪🏻

Big thanks to a great community for finding and reporting bugs! You make the tool better and you rock 🤘 (random order)
@rousku for reporting bug on W0319 (#589)
@IlfirinPL for reporting bugs on W0901 (#588) and I0912 (#592)
@rikerfi for reporting bug on W0302 (#558)
@polewczakp for reporting bug on W1004 (#513)
@MoreFamed for reporting bug on W0319 (#593)
@KUGA2 for reporting issue with W0302 rule's message (#548)
@Leemur89 for reporting bug on W0202 (#526)

2.0.1

Fixes

• Comment section without *** Comments *** section should now not fail when reporting empty-line-after-section (#582)
• It is now safe to use Robocop 2.0 with Robot Framework 4.1.3 (without breaking on new syntax) (#583)

Other

• Our dependencies are sorted and normalized (#584)

Acknowledgements

Big thanks to @bollwyvl for improving how we define our dependencies and @oboehmer for finding the issue with sections rules.

2.0.0

Robocop 2.0

1.5 year of Robocop's devoted service has passed this month but we already made him older with the version 2.0!

The release includes support for Robot Framework 5.0 but the most important thing is that any
custom user-created rules are not compatible with this version and need to be migrated (more about that below).
Moreover, we improved our documentation with the examples for nearly every rule and the layout of the documentation
also changed to a better one! There are 8 new rules, some others are improved, few fixes, performance enhancements
and better exception handling. Please read the complete release notes to familiarize with what Robocop 2.0 has now
to offer.

We would also like to apologize that some bugs waited so long to be fixed. Our plan for the next release is to fix
all bugs that are left in the backlog and add any missing support for RF 5.0. Next, we want to focus on any other
features that we want Robocop to have.

• Backward-incompatible changes
• Rules
• Fixes
• Other
• Acknowledgements

Backward-incompatible changes

• The rules are now defined as class (instead of a tuple). (#516)
  This makes the code a lot more readable and creation of new rules is a lot easier but... is also causes all
  external rules created by the users not being compatible with RoboCop 2.0. They need to be migrated, so we
  recommend reading the
  "External Rules" chapter from our documentation to
  better understand how it works now. All built-in rules in Robocop are already migrated, but if you have some custom
  ones, you need to migrate them by yourself. In case of any questions or issues, ping as on our
  #robocop-linter Slack channel.
• Rule W0603 (tag-with-reserved) name has changed to tag-with-reserved-word (#573)
• Rule E0902 (keyword-after-return-from) has been removed and replaced with W0901 (keyword-after-return) (#576)

Rules

• NEW: W0609 (duplicated-tags) notifies if the same tag was used several times (#542, #291)
• NEW: I0914 (if-can-be-merged) suggests merging several IF conditions into one, if they have identical
  conditions (#543, #441)
• NEW: E0915 (statement-outside-loop) checks if keywords like Exit For Loop (If), Continue For Loop (If) or statements like BREAK, CONTINUE are used only inside the loop (#562, #477, #577)
• NEW: W0608 (empty-tags) detects [Tags] setting in keywords and test cases that has no values (#508, #440)
• NEW: W0813 (duplicated-setting) warns user about duplicated setting (e.g. Force Tags) (#572)
• NEW: W0319 (deprecated-statement) reports when deprecated keyword is used depending on the RF version in use
  (#565, #560, #576)
• NEW: E0414 (return-in-test-case) detects RETURN statements used outside the keywords (#576)
• NEW: I0916 (inline-if-can-be-used) suggests whether to replace simple IF with new inline IF (#578, #546)
• UPDATE: E0303 (keyword-name-is-reserved-word) supports detecting reserved names introduced in RF 5.0 (#570, #568)
• UPDATE: E0401 (parsing-error) now also detects if positional argument is passed after named argument (#541, #474)
• UPDATE: E0412 (invalid-for-loop) now better detects any syntax errors in FOR loop (#572)
• UPDATE: W0603 (tag-with-reserved-word) is extended with another special tags with robot: prefix (#573, #559)
• UPDATE: W0901 (keyword-after-return) replaces removed rule E0902 (keyword-after-return-from) (#576)
• REMOVED: E0902 (keyword-after-return-from) (#576)

Fixes

• Robocop now properly parses keywords that are preceded with a library name (e.g. BuiltIn.Run Keyword If) (#519)
• Some rules now better point to the place where the issue occurred
• Many rules have more precise message (#533)
• Using Gherkin syntax (given, When, Then, And) now doesn't throw an exception (#549, #550)

Other

• The documentation has been significantly improved with a lot of good practices with real-life
  examples about which code violates specific rule and why (#527, #468, #555)
• (related to previous one) Rule class now accepts docs argument which is dedicated for providing the extended
  documentation for specific rule (#528)
• (related to previous one) Jinja templating is now supported in rules' documentation, which means that instead of
  mystical rule message like "Section name should be in format '%s' or '%s'", it can now be defined as
  "Section name should be in format '{capitalized}' or '{uppercase}'" (#534, #535)
• Robocop now skips reading paths defined in .gitignore file (#531, #476)
• Exceptions handling has been significantly improved. Now all known issues or possible to catch errors should have
  much better descriptions and additional warning messages. Only unexpected issues now display stacktrace (#521, #530)
• Some rules that are available only in a specific version of Robot Framework will be properly marked when calling
  robocop --list (enabled/disabled) (#532, #507)
• New CLI argument -gd/--ignore-default now supports excluding directories and files (and it already has some nice
  default list of ignored paths) (#540, #475)
• Robocop is now faster since it excludes some files and directories from parsing phase. Depending on the repository
  size, the execution time can be reduced up to 20% (#540, #475)
• The documentation theme has been changed to "furo" - more readable one which includes better navigation and supports
  dropdowns (#567, #563)
• version attribute can now be specified for each rule to define which Robot Framework version enables it (#545, #544)
• Support for Robot Framework 5.0 including:
  • IF, ELSE & ELSE IF conditions support (#551)
  • Updated rule W0603 (more info in Rules section above) (#559)
  • Updated many tests to cover support for RF 5.0 syntax (#574)
  • New rule W0319 (more info in Rules section above) (#565)
  • New rule I0916 (more info in Rules section above) (#546)
• Added performance tests that create JSON report with test results which later can be compared with previous
  results. They can be run with pytest --benchmark-enable tests. See
  here for more details. (#495, #467)
• Configuration file is now always loaded first by default and any CLI arguments append to it (#512)
• General code refactor, updated links in documentation, improved comments and print messages (#577)
• Added Python 3.10 support (#577)
• Removed deprecation warnings for the rules updated in the previous releases:
  • "missing-whitespace-after-setting" which is now "not-enough-whitespace-after-setting",
  • "variable-should-left-aligned" which is now "variable-should-be-left-aligned",
  • "0304" which is now "0406",
  • "invalid-char-in-name" which is now "not-allowed-char-in-name".

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our community for staying with us this whole time and for contribution to make Robocop even better!
Special thanks to users that helped with this release:

• @MoreFamed for suggestion to improve messages of some rules (#500)
• @d-biehl for reporting a bug about Gherkin being not fully supported by Robocop (#549)
• @bithium for creating PR that improved how configuration is loaded (#512)
• @MalikMlitat for adding new W0319 rule that detects deprecated keywords (#565)

And I (@mnojek) would like to dedicate a huge thank you to @bhirsz who is constantly working on making the tool
better. You are awesome! 🎉

1.12.0

This small but impactful release addresses the way Robocop deals with the configuration files. And it was fully implemented by our community! After this change all configuration files will be loaded by default (and not only when calling robocop without any options or paths). Configuration from command line will extend loaded configuration. This will allow to have configuration file with all configuration (excluded, included, format etc.) and still being able to run robocop on single source with robocop test.robot.

Features

• always load configuration files (.robocop and .pyproject.toml) #511

Acknowledgements

Thanks @bithium for creating & implementing the issue.

1.11.2

Fix for parsing configuration files with non-ASCII characters.

Fixes

• Robocop should now parse configuration file with non-ASCI characters (#492)