Feature Request: Show Cobertura Generation Date

[princefishthrower]

While I really like that the report itself shows when it was generated, I don't see any reference to the timestamp of the coverage.cobertura.xml file that was used for the actual generation. I ran into an issue thinking I was looking at a "new" report, but really in the background, I was using the same coverage report from weeks ago. Really confusing if you don't look into the folder and data of where your Cobertura files live.

I suggest simply a new key-value pair in the summary area of the report that provides this info (maybe even as the second one right under "generated on", for example:

"coverage.cobertura.xml generated on:" "3/9/2022 - 7:42:51 PM"

What do you think of this feature? Would have saved me a large amount of time spent head-scratching.

[danielpalme]

Good idea!
I will consider this for the next release.
I have to think about some edge cases:

• ReportGenerator supports several input formats, not all of them contain a date. If that's the case, no date will be displayed in the report
• You can pass several coverage files and ReportGenerator merges them. The files can have different dates. My idea is to display the minimum / maximum dates in the report.

What do you think?

[princefishthrower]

@danielpalme - this would be awesome! And thanks so much for the fast reply! Both points seem to make a lot of sense to me.

One question about this merging functionality, I didn't even realize this was possible - does it show any sort of chart of improvement (or degradation) of coverage over time? Like a chart? Or how does this merge work exactly? Is there a link to the documentation for this?

Thanks again!

[danielpalme]

There are two concepts:

• Merging: This means you pass several coverage files via the -reports:... command line parameter. ReportGenerator will then parse all of your coverage files and merge them together to get a single coverage report
• History: If you use the -historydir:... command line parameter, ReportGenerator will collect historic coverage information and you will get:
  • A history chart on the summary page and every class page
  • An option to compare coverage results on the summary page

[danielpalme]

I just published release 5.1.0

You will see this element on the summary page:

The "Coverage date" is what you are looking for.

Don't be confused, the key-value table has been replaced in this release with some cards!

[princefishthrower]

Hey, incredible work! I'll update my version and check it out very soon!