Cannot access dict variable value by attribute access syntax which is set by Set Test Variable

[kanchi240]

Hi,

Test library is:

from robot.libraries.BuiltIn import BuiltIn

class MyLib:
    def set_a_dict_var(self):
        d = {'k1': 'v1'}
        BuiltIn().set_test_variable('${d}', d)

And test case is:

*** Settings ***
Library           MyLib

*** Test Cases ***
test
    set_a_dict_var
    log    ${d}[k1]
    log    ${d.k1}

And test log is:

And I see the user guide said:

https://robotframework.org/robotframework/latest/RobotFrameworkUserGuide.html#id575

If a key is a string, it is possible to access its value also using attribute access syntax ${NAME.key}.

Is it an issue? Thanks

[pekkaklarck]

When you create a dict variable in Robot data, Robot automatically converts it into its own DotDict instance that supports the dict.key syntax. In your case the variable is a normal Python dict that doesn't have such support. You should be able to get the desired behavior by simply using

BuiltIn().set_test_variable('&{d}', d)

to tell Robot that this is a dict variable. If that doesn't work, then it's a bug in set_test_variable. A workaround would be constructing a DotDict yourself.

[kanchi240]

Covert d to DotDict then access value using attribute access syntax is ok,
but using BuiltIn().set_test_variable('&{d}', d) failed, error message is:

TypeError: unhashable type: 'slice'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\CBS2.0\lib\MyLib.py", line 8, in set_dict_var
    BuiltIn().set_test_variable('&{d}', d)
  File "d:\pyenv\robot\lib\site-packages\robot\libraries\BuiltIn.py", line 1427, in set_test_variable
    value = self._get_var_value(name, values)
  File "d:\pyenv\robot\lib\site-packages\robot\libraries\BuiltIn.py", line 1572, in _get_var_value
    return VariableTableValue(values, name).resolve(self._variables)
  File "d:\pyenv\robot\lib\site-packages\robot\variables\tablesetter.py", line 56, in VariableTableValue
    return VariableTableValue(value, error_reporter)
  File "d:\pyenv\robot\lib\site-packages\robot\variables\tablesetter.py", line 62, in __init__
    self._values = self._format_values(values)
  File "d:\pyenv\robot\lib\site-packages\robot\variables\tablesetter.py", line 123, in _format_values
    return list(self._yield_formatted(values))
  File "d:\pyenv\robot\lib\site-packages\robot\variables\tablesetter.py", line 130, in _yield_formatted
    name, value = split_from_equals(item)
  File "d:\pyenv\robot\lib\site-packages\robot\utils\escaping.py", line 129, in split_from_equals
    index = _get_split_index(string)
  File "d:\pyenv\robot\lib\site-packages\robot\utils\escaping.py", line 136, in _get_split_index
    while '=' in string[index:]:

[pekkaklarck]

Yeah, in this case set_test_variable expects second (and subsequent) arguments to be strings in format name=value. I guess it could be special cased to handle values that are dicts, but same approach wouldn't work with @{list} variables and inconsistency wouldn't be good. Alternatively we could change these keywords accept also **kwargs but that has its own issues as well. I'll leave this issue open and think about this later. Explicitly using DotDict in custom libraries is a good solution anyway.