Add more information to your Allure Report using Java

#java #testing #tutorial

Introduction

Instead of using some approaches that can add an extra abstraction layer to deliver a pretty report, we can use one with less code showing similar results using Allure Reports.

The report can show all the test information and metrics. Sometimes we would like to add extra/custom information to remember the configuration set, the browser used, users, endpoints, etc…

You will learn how to add any additional information to the Allure Report. You will no miss any important information.

The problem

Allure Reports has an Environment section where you can place environment information using a .properties or .xml file into the allure-results directory. You can see the official explanation here.

The problem is you need to add or change it manually to see the information in the report.

The Solution

The allure-environment-writer Java library allows the automatic environment file generation, adding it into the allure-results folder.

Import the library

Add the dependency in your preferred build tool. This is the example using Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.automatedowl</groupId>
    <artifactId>allure-environment-writer</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Adding the environment data

A good practice is to use the environment writer as the first pre-condition in your tests, like @BeforeSuite for TestNG or @BeforeAll for JUnit 5.

We will use the allureEnvironmentWriter static method from the AllureEnvironmentWriter class. This method receives an ImmutableMap from the Guava library.

We must create a key-value immutable map and at its values to the reports Environment section.

import com.google.common.collect.ImmutableMap;
import static com.github.automatedowl.tools.AllureEnvironmentWriter.allureEnvironmentWriter;

public class ExampleTest {

    @BeforeSuite
    void setAllureEnvironment() {
        allureEnvironmentWriter(
                ImmutableMap.<String, String>builder()
                        .put("Browser", "Chrome")
                        .put("Browser.Version", "87.0.4280.88")
                        .put("URL", "http://eliasnogueira.com")
                        .build());
    }

    @Test
    void myTest() {
        // test goes here
    }
}

As you can see that we are adding the browser type, browser version, and URL information into the Allure Report using the @BeforeSuite to set this data.

Run the test

Now you can run the test and generate the report. The report will look like the image below:

Usage tip

Instead of writing the environment information into the class and modify it in every execution, we can use the information we have stored into some configuration like a properties file.

Real example

The selenium-java-lean-test-architecture project has the following architecture decision to add environment information into the Allure Report.

This project has three different configurations file
- general.properties: general configuration
- grid.properties: grid specific configuration
- local.properties: local test specific configuration
AllureManager class: this class has the environment data to set into the report and the screenshots. You can see that the data passed to the environment is provided by the Configuration class. This class loads all the property values. We can attach all the configurations applied to the test.