Support Robot's libdoc xml format when defining 3rd party libraries

[Tattoo]

Generally with Robot Framework, one ends up with writing a lot of small libraries as well as employing the wealth of existing libraries in the ecosystem (see External tab)

Currently, Intellisense to be able to find keywords from 3rd party libraries by defining them keyword-by-keyword under rfLanguageServer.libraries setting.

Robot Framework has built-in documentation tool libdoc that 3rd party library developers are expected to use to document their libraries. This tool supports outputting library's keyword documentation in XML format, intended for editors and similar tools to have easily programmatically readable format. Users can also create these XML specs themselves as well from any library they might have.

It would be great, if I could simply define paths to the xmls I already have, something akin to this:

"rfLanguageServer.libraries": [
  {
    "name": "MyLibrary",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "keywords": [
      { "name": "My Keyword 1", "args": ["arg1"], "doc": "documentation" },
      { "name": "My Keyword 2", "args": [],       "doc": "documentation" }
    ]
  },
 '/path/to/MyAnotherLibrary.xml',
'C:\\path\\to\\YetAnotherLibrary.xml'
]

[Snooz82]

@Tattoo
i made a small python class to convert libdoc xml to this json.
https://github.com/Snooz82/LibDoc2Json

[utknl]

I am adding the generated json file inside library-docs however when I type the library name vscode says:

Value is not accepted. Valid values: "BuiltIn-2.7.7",......

Is there any suggestion on how to solve this issue?

[Ka55i0peia]

It might be a bit hacky. But i don't like to add all keyword to my settings for several reasons.

Instead of adding all kw to settings (.vscode/settings.json) like this

"rfLanguageServer.libraries": [{
    "name": "MyLibrary",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "keywords": [
      { "name": "My Keyword 1", "args": ["arg1"], "doc": "documentation" },
      { "name": "My Keyword 2", "args": [],       "doc": "documentation" }
    ]
  }}

I rather simply like todo

"rfLanguageServer.libraries": [
        "MyLib-1.0.0"
    ],

To make this working, I used the nice helper tool from @Snooz82 (robotframework-LibDoc2Json) as follows:

1. Generate the keyword json doc using robotframework-LibDoc2Json and copy the json file into the extention folder ~/.vscode/extensions/tomiturtiainen.rf-intellisense-2.8.0/server/library-docs/. Lets say we call this file MyLib-1.0.0.json
2. Edit the extention package.json located at ~/.vscode/extensions/tomiturtiainen.rf-intellisense-2.8.0/package.json by adding an enumeration value to rfLanguageServer.libraries. Lets say we call this MyLib-1.0.0 as in the mini sample above.
3. Restart vscode and you'll get context support in robot files. 😃

Anyhow, this is a simple workaround with the given tools. Let the extention work with the xml output of libdoc (or maybe trigger robot.libdoc to generate an xml from third party libs) would do the trick much more clean 👍