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Benefits of Different Reporters

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Feedback and Granularity

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

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. This feature makes it easy to update multiple failures at once, especially when a single change affects numerous tests.

Rendering

Different viewing options may be useful depending on the nature of the changes. For instance, when working on an HTML page, you may want to examine the results in two ways:

  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
Loading

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 an example in Java please see ExecutableCommands.