Parse Robot Framework's output xml

Question

Robot framework spits out an output XML which is then used to build the HTML reports (with rebot), re-run failures, etc.

I need to parse this file to generate other reports, in particular, I need to parse the test case's documentation for a regex, get the test case result and then build a report (this is for integration with a legacy system).

Does Robot Framework provide functionality to easily parse the output XML file or we just use standard XML parsing libraries?

Answer 1

Ok, found 3 viable responses:

1. Use DbBot and query the DB created.
2. Parse the XML file directly. Using xml.etree.ElementTree is pretty simple.
3. Use Robot Framework's ExecutionResult, which follows the Visitor pattern (in ResultVisitor, which we have to extend) and that allows you to do what you need in the visit_test method.

Ended up with going with option 3 as that is part of Robot Framework and less likely to break (or easier to fix) if the format of the XML file changes.