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randomsync / robotframework-mqttlibrary

MQTT Keyword Library for Robot Framework
Apache License 2.0
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Asynchronous subscription to message #6

Closed maartenl945 closed 5 years ago

maartenl945 commented 6 years ago

Hi,

I've just started using your library to test whether our product generates an MQTT message at the right moment. However, I noticed that the library currently only allows to subscribe to a topic and wait for a message within a single call. I would think that in most test cases it would be necessary to do a separate subscription and waiting for message. e.g. test steps would be:

  1. subscribe to MQTT topic and start waiting for messages
  2. do something that actually triggers a message
  3. get message on subscription and verify that it is correct

Since steps 1 and 3 are only possible in a single library call (Subscribe) this cannot be done. There is no room to do step 2 in between in robot framework since all steps are executed sequentially.

Do you have any suggestion on how to do this with the library or does the library need to be extended for that ?

Regards, Maarten

ek-akqa commented 6 years ago

I'm facing the same issue. The most useful tests would be asynchronous in my case too.

I tried to work around using robotframework-async but I either use it incorrectly or it just doesn't work - the second thread, in which MQTT communication is to take place, doesn't seem to start, produces nothing on stdout/stderr and causes Robot to hang infinitely waiting for that thread to finish.

maartenl945 commented 5 years ago

Has anybody found any work around for this yet ?

ek-akqa commented 5 years ago

I ended up using robot's Start Process to wrap mqtt CLI tools (e.g. mosquitto_sub/_pub) and abandoned this mqtt library

maartenl945 commented 5 years ago

Thanks for that suggestion. Will look into it.

maartenl945 commented 5 years ago

@randomsync We're now using the solution that was introduced in PR #9 which seems to work fine. The advantage compared to a wrap of mosquitto tools is that it is all in Python and therefore works on multiple platforms. I think it's indispensable for any serious use of the library to have some sort of asynchronous subscription to messages. It would be nice if this solution was made part of the official library.

randomsync commented 5 years ago

@maartenl945 thanks for the tagging me as I didn't receive any notifications for this thread. It's been a while since I worked on this library so please bear with me as I review this PR.

randomsync commented 5 years ago

This has been merged and released in v0.6.0. Thanks @janvanoverwalle

maartenl945 commented 5 years ago

Great, thanks @randomsync and @janvanoverwalle !!