UseACustomReporter.md

How to Use A Custom Reporter

This guide is for creating the ability to use a custom reporter that works on your machine.

For figuring out how to make a more robust custom reporter, that you might want to submit back to us as a Pull Request, check out How to Submit a New Reporter to ApprovalTests.

Let's say that you really enjoy using Sublime Merge, and on your system it's located in "/Applications/Sublime Merge.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/smerge"

If you were to run this the command line, the full command would look this this:

"/Applications/Sublime Merge.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/smerge" mergetool --no-wait "test.received.txt" "test.approved.txt" -o "test.approved.txt" &

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You can do this simply by creating a Reporter using:

auto path = "/Applications/Sublime Merge.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/smerge";
auto arguments = "mergetool --no-wait {Received} {Approved} -o {Approved}";
auto reporter = ApprovalTests::CustomReporter::create(path, arguments);

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By default, this will run in the background. Most of the time this is what you want.

However, you can force it to run in the foreground with:

auto reporter =
    ApprovalTests::CustomReporter::createForegroundReporter(path, arguments);

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On Windows, you can specify a search path for the installed location of a program with {ProgramFiles}.

auto path = "{ProgramFiles}Beyond Compare 4\\BCompare.exe";
auto reporter = ApprovalTests::CustomReporter::create(path);

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See Registering a default reporter for wiring up this reporter as default, or you can dereference it and pass it in to individual verify("text", *reporter) method calls...

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