How are Robot Framework Test Suite Directories working precisely?

Question

I am working on a Python library and test suite for testing particular pieces of hardware by using Robot Framework. At that point, I have enough test cases to think about splitting them into several files or even test suites, so I went to the User Guide and found Test Suite Directories section .

Following the description, I have created following directory structure:

MyPythonLib\
    MyPythonLib.py
    ...
MyTestSuite\
    __init__.robot
    01_FirstSetOfTests.robot
    02_SecondSetOfTests.robot
Common.robot

The __init__.robot file contains my settings:

*** Settings ***
Library     Dialogs
Library     Collections
Resource    ../Common.robot
Library     ../MyPythonLib/MyPythonLib.py

*** Keywords ***

Some Keywords Specified Here

Then I run the test suite by specifying directory instead of a file, like this:

robot MyTestSuite

When doing so, it does not recognize keywords specified in __init__.robot file, as well as others. Since all of the settings are taken away from test case files, as I expected them to be included with the __init__ file, this makes me question if the directories are parsed as I understand they should. What am I doing wrong and how can I solve that issue?

Answer 1

The behavior you describe is documented behavior.

From the robot framework user guide (emphasis added):

Variables and keywords created or imported in initialization files are not available in the lower level test suites . If you need to share variables or keywords, you can put them into resource files that can be imported both by initialization and test case files.