Benefits of Different Reporters

Feedback and Granularity

flowchart
Run --> Pass
Run --> Fail
Fail --> reporter["Open Reporter (Diff Tool)"]
style Fail fill:#f00
style Pass fill:#0f0

When your tests fail, ApprovalTests will open a reporter. A reporter allows you to do many things. The most common is to view the results in a diff tool.

There are many different diff tools that ApprovalTests automatically supports. The primary reason to change a reporter is to use the diff tool of your choice, but there are other services reporters can perform, including:

  • Scripting
  • Rendering
  • Executing

Scripting

The ClipboardReporter and DelayedClipboardReporter will automatically create a BASH script needed to approve the failing (or all of the failing) tests. Using this reporter can make it easy to update hundreds of failures if you do a single thing that affects many tests.

Rendering

Depending on what has changed you may want to look at your results in a different way. For example, let’s say we were working on an HTML page. There are two ways you might want to view the results:

  1. HTML text in a diff reporter. This is very helpful to find very detailed changes
  2. Rendered in a browser. This is very helpful when you want to know what the page actually looks like.
flowchart
Run --> Fail
Fail --> DiffReporter["DiffReporter\n(Open HTML in Diff Tool)"]
Fail --> FileLauncherReporter["FileLauncherReporter\n(Open in Browser)"]
style Fail fill:#f00

Executing

This is a more advanced form of rendering. For example, let’s say you create a function that creates a piece of Java. On failure, you would like to know if the Java compiles. You might want to call a reporter that compiles the given Java code, and reports its success. You do NOT want to do this when the test passes.

I have found executing reporters to be useful for:

  • Linting and compiling
  • SQL
  • REST API calls
  • Photos of rendered results (e.g.: this is what the page looks like on an iPhone 8, iPhone 13 Pro, and Android Galaxy)
  • Capture .received. files from CI - Java

For more on this please see ExecutableCommands - Java.