Robot Framework 5.0 rc 1 has been released!

Robot Framework
1

Robot Framework 5.0 is a big new major release with lot of interesting new features such as TRY/EXCEPT, WHILE, inline IF, RETURN, BREAK and CONTINUE syntax, support for custom argument conversion in libraries and various enhancements to xUnit outputs. Robot Framework 5.0 only works with Python 3.6 or newer.

Robot Framework 5.0 release candidate 1 contains all planned features and code changes. Please test the release candidate in your environment and provide feedback about possible problems. The final release is targeted for Wednesday March 23, 2022.

For more details see the release notes.

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Notice that WHILE and EXCEPT syntax has changed slightly compared to previous releases. There are some changes to WHILE and EXCEPT compared to earlier preview releases. The former now has a default limit of 10 000 iterations to avoid problems with accidental endless loops. The limit can be configured or disabled altogether using new limit configuration parameter. For example, limit=100 changes limit to 100 iterations, limit=1 minute changes it to one minute, and limit=NONE disables it.

WHILE    True    limit=100
    Log    This is run 100 times
END

With EXCEPT the change is that pattern type configuration is nowadays done using a separate type parameter instead of prefixing the pattern with the type as earlier.

TRY
    Keyword
EXCEPT    ValueError: *    type=glob
    Handler Keyword 1
EXCEPT    TypeError: .*    type=regexp    AS    ${error}
    Handler Keyword 2    ${error}
END

For more details and examples see the aforementioned release notes.

3

Hi,

Is “run keyword if” and [Return] syntax still usable with this new release. Or do you have to refactor those to IF or RETURN?

4

There’s no plan to deprecate Run Keyword If. [Return] still works as well. It will be deprecated and removed in the future, though.

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5

Thanks everyone who has tested the release candidate! We have just released the second rc with fixes to all bugs reported since the first one. Also Libdoc’s HTML output has been enhanced. New release notes can be found here.

Please keep testing the preview releases and report possible problems. If no major issues are found, the final release will be out on Wednesday, March 23, 2022.