Idea: Exclude Scenarios or Features by tags

[dirkrombauts]

Background: our repository of feature files contains several files about future user stories. It's misleading if those appear in the living documentation, at least if the living documentation is meant to showcase the current behaviour of the system. It gets even more "misleading" if the test results are shown as well, because there would be lots of inconclusive scenarios simply because the automation layer hasn't been written yet.

So I propose to add some way to exclude some scenarios or features from the generated documentation, for example to filter out those that have one or more from a list of tags provided as parameter to pickles.

[dirkrombauts]

I'm closing this issue because it has a new home at uservoice: https://pickles.uservoice.com/forums/232147-general/suggestions/5728975-exclude-scenarios-or-features-by-tags

[dirkrombauts]

The community came back with this feature request: https://pickles.uservoice.com/forums/232147-general/suggestions/9796998-support-filtering-by-tags

[dirkrombauts]

I think the same type of functionality that we have with running NUNIT from msbuild:
INCLUDES and EXCLUDES

Some examples:

• only tags matching “GUI”
• Only tags matching “DB” and “CI”
• Exclude tags matching “GUI”
• Only tags matching “DB” and “CI” except for “GUI”

However, a great start would simply be: "only scenarios with this tag” and "except scenarios with this tag"; more sophisticated boolean logic predicates could come later. However, care should be taken so that adding the more complex expressions later does not break scripts with the simple expressions.

[ngm]

Is this feature in development, or still up for grabs? Was there any spiking done?

I would like this feature very much. (Coming from a slightly different use case: I work on "software product lines", where multiple different versions of a product can be configured from a collection of possible components. I use tags to tag the features and scenarios that apply to each product. So when I produce the docs for a particular customer, I want to only include the features/scenarios that they have included for them.)

[dirkrombauts]

Your scenario makes perfect sense to me :-)

Nobody is working on this at the moment, so please go ahead and take a stab at it.

[dlidstrom]

Perhaps it would be useful to have the other option too: IncludeTags (a list of tags to include). That would complete this feature combo, don't you think?

[dirkrombauts]

@dlidstrom the really cool version would be some kind of simple logical language to specify tags to include and exclude. See my 2nd comment in January 2016.

[dlidstrom]

@dirkrombauts That looks good, definitely. Some tools allow you to use regular expression for include and exclude statements. I'm not sure how that option would combine with whatever Pickles supports now, but it's easy to implement and usually covers most needs:

• only tags matching “GUI”: --include "^GUI$"
• Only tags matching “DB” and “CI”: --include "^DB|CI$"
• Exclude tags matching “GUI”: --exclude "^GUI$"
• Only tags matching “DB” and “CI” except for “GUI”: --include "^DB|CI$" --exclude "^GUI$"

[dirkrombauts]

I'll be happy to review any pull requests you may send my way ;-)

[dirkrombauts]

It's been an amazing time for me to work on Pickles. Now it's finally time for me to lay down the mantle and move on. I am leaving Pickles completely.

I am closing this issue, so that the next maintainer of this repository can start from a clean slate.

Do you want to take over active development and maintenance at Pickles? Contact me directly at dirk dot rombauts at picklesdoc dot com. I will hand over everything Pickles-related to you. This email address will remain active until 11 December 2020.

[zadigus]

What's the status on this feature? I'd need it.

[ericcmmi]

It is not currently being worked on. I just took over the project and I'm trying to get up to speed and prioritize issues. Dirk closed issues as he was wrapping things up but this can be opened again once we start working on things.