Robot Framework real world example in C / C++

This simple example demonstrates how to use C / C++ language from Robot Framework test libraries.
The example uses Python's standard ctypes module,
which requires that the C code is compiled into a shared library.

This version is implemented and tested on Linux,
but adapting it to other operating systems would require only changing compilation and name of the produced shared library.

If you are mainly interested to learn how to create tests cases for Robot Framework or how to extend it with custom libraries,
you should probably study other documentation and demo projects instead.

Downloading demo package

If you interested in running tests yourself, then clone this repository then do make and robot command!

System under test

The demo application is a very simple login system myLib.c,
that validates the given user name and password and returns the status.
There are two valid username password combinations:

demo/mode and john/long.

Before running the demo,
you need to compile the demo application by simply running make in the directory that was created when you extracted the demo package.
This will create shared library myLib.so.

Test library

myLibTest.py_ is a simple test library that can interact with the system under test using the ctypes module.
The library provides only one keyword Check User.

The if __name__ == '__main__' block in LoginLibrary.py is not used by the executed tests,
but it allows using the library code as a tool for manual testing.

You can test this handy behavior on the command line:

    python LoginLibrary.py demo mode
    python LoginLibrary.py demo invalid

Test cases

The myLibTest.robot test case file contains all tests for this demo.
It contains separate tests for valid and invalid login.

Preconditions

A precondition for running the tests is having Robot Framework installed.
Installation instructions cover that in detail,
but if you have pip installed you can simply run:

    pip3 install robotframework

Robot Framework 3.0 and newer support Python 3 in addition to Python 2.
Also this demo project is nowadays Python 3 compatible.

Execution

After Robot Framework is installed, the demo can be executed using the robot command:

    robot myLibTest.robot

Run robot --help for more information about the command line usage and see
Robot Framework User Guide for more details about test execution and Robot Framework in general.

note: If you are using Robot Framework 2.9 or earlier, you need to use the pybot command instead.

Generated results

After running tests you will get report and log in HTML format.
Example files are also visible online in case you are not interested in running the demo yourself:

• report.html
• log.html

Reference

C program library demo: https://bitbucket.org/robotframework/cdemo/src/master/
Robot Framework: http://robotframework.org
project downloads: http://bitbucket.org/robotframework/cdemo/downloads
ctypes module: http://docs.python.org/2/library/ctypes.html
Installation instructions: https://github.com/robotframework/robotframework/blob/master/INSTALL.rst
pip: http://pip-installer.org
Robot Framework User Guide: http://robotframework.org/robotframework/#user-guide
report.html: http://robotframework.bitbucket.org/CDemo/report.html
log.html: http://robotframework.bitbucket.org/CDemo/log.html