Canonical Guide to Tag Formatting?

Robot Framework
1

I’ve been using RF for awhile now (October 2014), but I don’t know the answer to this.

Looking at the official documentation, I see that “Tags are free text” and the examples appear to include spaces and inline variable references. However, I only see lower-case tag names being used.

Additionally, I see that all the reserved tags follow kebab-case.

Finally, I see that RoboTidy assumes lower-cased tags by default.

Q: is there an official/canonical/idiomatic format for tags?

Context

I’m re-joining a company I worked at before, and I was the first person to introduced RF to the product team. In the intervening 2½ years since I’ve been gone, the code base has expanded quite a bit. Most of the code is pretty decent, even achieving some things that would have been a challenge for me. However, there’s a lot of willy-nilly conventions and patterns that I’d like to incrementally edit/adjust to proper standards.

2

Hi Greg,

I don’t think there is a style requirement from RF’s perspective, it’s a pretty flexible tool, but there are a few things to keep in mind when creating a standard or style guide:

  • spaces in tag names will make your life harder at the command line when try to filter by tags, so CamelCase or kabab-case are probably a better choice
  • If tags might get passed through to a filename and you have a mixed environment keep you cases all the same (all lower or all upper) as Windows will treat Cat, cAT, CAT, and cat as the same file but *nix systems (including MacOS) will treat them all as different files

Dave.

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