While Robot Framework is running tests, it generates an XML output file containing all information about the execution. After execution is over it creates, by default, log and report files using rebot tool internally. The same rebot functionality can also be used externally afterwards both as a standalone tool and programmatically.

This document describes the format of the output file in high level and in the same folder there are detailed XML schema definition (XSD) files that can be used for validating that an XML file is Robot Framework compatible. The output file format can be useful both for people interested in parsing the output and for people interested to create Robot Framework compatible outputs.

These are the main elements of the XML output with descriptions of their sub-elements. Unless stated otherwise, all attributes are optional. Additionally rebot does not care of the order of the XML elements, except for the order of suite, test, and kw elements.

Before Robot Framework 2.9 all elements and attributes were always written to output, regardless whether they had a value. For example, a keyword that did not have a documentation would still have an empty <doc> element and every keyword without a timeout had an empty timeout attribute. Starting from version 2.9 Robot Framework no longer writes empty elements or attributes to the output XML.

robot - root element

• suite - root element always has one suite which contains the subsuites and tests
• statistics - statistics contains statistics of the test run
• errors - if there were any errors, they are listed in this element

suite - suite element, name is given as an attribute

• kw - suite can have two kw elements: setup and teardown, both are optional
• suite - any number of sub suites in execution order
• test - any number of tests in execution order
• doc - optional documentation element
• metadata - optional suite metadata
• status - suite has to have a status element

test - test element, name is given as an attribute

• kw - keywords of the test in execution order
• msg - optional test message
• doc - optional test documentation
• tags - optional test tags
• status - test has to have a status

kw - keyword element, name is given as an attribute. Type attribute describes the type of keyword. If this attribute is not present, type is assumed to be kw.

• tags - optional keyword tags (new in 2.9)
• doc - optional keyword documentation
• arguments - optional keyword arguments
• assignment - possible assignment of keyword's return values to variables, each variable in var subelement (new in 2.9)
• kw - possible sub-keywords in execution order
• msg - any number of optional keyword messages
• status - keyword has to have a status

For more details and full list of elements and attributes, please see the XML schema files below.

Available schema files:

• robot-xsd10.xsd - XSD 1.0 compatible version
• robot-xsd11.xsd - XSD 1.1 compatible version

The latter schema file is more complete, but XSD 1.1 is not as widely supported as the 1.0 version.