TWiki formatting - Doing a test report

Table Macro Explanation

DTABLE
This macro is used to spit out the start of the table. It has an optional parameter DTABLE_STYLE which can be used to control the positioning of the table. You can use CSS style parameters here.

• %DTABLE{DTABLE_STYLE="margin-left:100px;"}%
  • This indents the table by 100 px.
• %DTABLE{DTABLE_STYLE="float:right;"}%
  • This lets the table float to the right.

DTABLEROW
This macro starts a new (or the first) row. It takes the content for the first column as it's default parameter. Hence it is referred as %DEFAULT% inside the macro. It is passed to the macro without a parameter name (refer to the example above).

DTABLEEND
This macro ends the table by closing all open HTML tags.

More Table Ideas

The above macros utilize the twiki CSS table styles. You might not like them as

• the grid is missing vertical lines (although some browsers show them)
• the grid is very light, which makes the lines disappear on some TFT screens due to color inversion

You could add your own styles inside the twiki CSS files and refer to them. If you cannot change the CSS files, you can also hack the styles into the macros as shown below (names changed so both versions can be tested in paralell). Note that boarder-color is not inherited from <table> to <td>, so it must be specified for each cell.

   * Set XTABLE = <div style="%XTABLE_STYLE%"><table cellpadding="6" border="1" rules="all" style="border-color: #c0c0c0; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-collapse: collapse;">
   * Set XTABLEROW = <tr valign="top"  ><td style="border-color: #c0c0c0; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid;"> %DEFAULT% </td><td style="border-color: #c0c0c0; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid;">
   * Set XTABLEEND = </td></tr></table></div>

And horror, you can even nest tables (goto raw-view for the code):

Generate Summary of Test results

Throughout my test report TWiki topic each performed test has its heading with a subsequent subheading Test result. This is written as follows.

---++ High Temperature Operation Test

:

---++++!! Test result

| High temperature operation test (70 °C) | %ICON{"choice-yes"}% | _optional comment_ |

The table renders as.

High temperature operation test (70 °C)

optional comment

Well, it would be nice to have a summary of all the test results at the beginning of the report. However this is more than a simple %TOC% can do.

How to do it?

I use one of my favorite plugins for this purpose: FilterPlugin. This plugin searches for any text (a Twiki syntax tables in my case) and inserts them into the topic where you need it:

%EXTRACT{topic="%TOPIC%" expand="off" pattern="^---\+\+\+\+!* +Test result[\r\n]*(\|.*?\|)$" format="$1$n"
header="| *Test* | *Result* | *Comments* |$n"
}%

This renders to something like this (simulated):

Test	Result	Comments
High temperature operation test (70 °C)		optional comment
Low temperature operation test (-10 °C)
Humidity Cyclic operation test (40 °C, 97 %)		HV unit sparked

Filter Plugin Explanation

The plugin searches the raw topic text due to the setting expand="off". It searches it's own topic due to topic="%TOPIC%".

pattern controls what is matched:

• ^---\+\+\+\+!* + - Matches for the heading syntax ---++++ at the start of a line (due to ^). This may optionally followed by ! if you prefer to hide this heading from the table of contents. Finally + (space followed by plus) allows one or more spaces.
• Test result[\r\n]* - This part of the pattern matches for the heading text (exact match) followed by the line break. [\r\n]* allows any sequence of CR or NL characters, so we even handle one or more empty lines or CRNL sequences.
• (\|.*?\|)$ - This finally matches the TWiki table, which is a line that starts and ends with |. Between those, it matches for any character but uses the special non-greedy *? quantifier to match only as little content as necessary. Using the greedy quantifier (*) here would match as much as possible. This could start one one line and match up to the end of a TWiki table many lines later. Anything between the brackets (the table line) is remembered for later use.

format is utilized to produce output each time the pattern matches. In this case it is easy: $1 just outputs the content remembered by the brackets in the pattern. $n generates a newline (just as %SEARCH% does).

Finally header is the header string prepended to output.

Comments

Thank you Stefan for sharing this with the TWiki community!

-- Peter Thoeny - 2013-08-07