JSON variable file support

[Xdomen]

Problem

robot --variablefile burek.json -i smoke ROBOT/ returns the following error:
failed: Importing variable file ’burek.json’ failed: Not a valid file or directory to import.

while burek.py containing the same JSON content seem to work just fine.

--variablefile (-V) only seems to support Python and YAML file types.
We would like to use JSON file as a variablefile to pass on certain variables that are used by other frameworks as well.

Thanks for all the help!

[pekkaklarck]

Adding support for JSON variable files wouldn't be too complicated. It would have a benefit that Python has a built-in json module but using YAML requires installing PyYYAML. I can add this to RF 6.1 scope and we can see is someone interested to look at it.

The reason I don't consider this super important is that you can already now pretty easily use JSON files as variable files. You can, for example, create a generic Python variable file that loads the JSON file. My understanding is that can also losslessly convert between JSON and YAML, so you could convert your JSON file to YAML before running Robot. It could even possible that just renaming your burek.yaml to burek.json would work. Anyway, being able to use JSON variable files directly and without installing PyYAML would be handy.

[sunday2]

Is anyone working on this.

[pekkaklarck]

Thanks for a great PR @sunday2! Sorry for the review taking so long. There were few simple changes to be done to code and tests. I hope you can take a look at them, but I can also merge the PR as-is and make changes myself. Another thing to do is writing documentation.

[sunday2]

Thanks for a great PR @sunday2! Sorry for the review taking so long. There were few simple changes to be done to code and tests. I hope you can take a look at them, but I can also merge the PR as-is and make changes myself. Another thing to do is writing documentation.

Thank you for the review and all the comments, I have updated the code and pls help review again.

[pekkaklarck]

Thanks again for a great and now finally merged PR @sunday2! I wrote documentation for this feature (see commit f7ee913) so we can consider this issue done.

[pekkaklarck]

If you want to see how the documentation actually looks, you can generate the User Guide locally with this command:

doc/userguide/ug2html.py create

If you see a typo or have enhancement ideas, just comment here or create another PR.

[sunday2]

If you want to see how the documentation actually looks, you can generate the User Guide locally with this command:

doc/userguide/ug2html.py create

If you see a typo or have enhancement ideas, just comment here or create another PR.

Thank you for the help, that's helpful.