Expose taskId (or some way of uniquely identifying test runners)

[pmowrer]

When using test file sharding, I can't seem to find a way of uniquely identifying each runner. Being able to do so is helpful when synchronizing shared resources between the runners.

By taskId, I'm referring to chrome #1-1, etc.

protractor/lib/taskScheduler.js

Line 90 in 6ebc4c3

var taskId = rotatedIndex + 1;

[sjelin]

The taskId is an arbitrary number. Just generate a UUID if you need a unique number.

[pmowrer]

@sjelin I'm not looking for a unique number, just a way to identify a task from another, period. If you know of a way to do this, please share.

[sjelin]

I don't understand. Surely giving each task a UUID is a way to identify one from another?

[pmowrer]

As an example, when test file sharding with maxInstances at 2, I'm looking for a way to know whether the currently running Protractor instance is #1 or #2.

[sjelin]

Why do you need to know if a task is 1 or 2? Why won't a UUID work? Again the taskId is arbitrary and exposing it would force us to have to keep it consistent over new version releases.

[pmowrer]

Probably easiest if I explain the use case:

Our tests use random subdomains as part of our test scenario. To facilitate on CI, we generate a file of X random subdomains that are written to the hosts file. When we run the test, Y test instances get an equal share, X/Y, subdomains that are read from the aforementioned file. Since none of the instances are aware of one another and they cannot communicate, they use an index to grab their X/Y chunk of the subdomains available. E.g. the instance 1 is index 1 and reads from the beginning until X/Y, instance 2 reads from X/Y until (X/Y) * 2, etc.

Since Protractor doesn't (to my knowledge) expose any way for us to identify a test runner, we use getMultiCapabilities() to assign an index to each capability. The test instance can then identify itself via browser.getProcessedConfig(). However, in the test sharding scenario, we've not been able to find a way of assigning indexes to the shard runners.

Hope that explains sufficiently.

[sjelin]

@juliemr thoughts?

[sricc]

Any update / info on this?

[juliemr]

I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to add this to the processed config, but we need to make sure we're doing it in a sane and simple way so we don't break it going forward.

[fcin]

I would love to have this feature soon, because I want customize my reporter with separate page for every file. Any progress?