[Rule] Duplicated Variable Name

[sebastianciupinski]

Robot Framework still have flat, common variables namespace. When you define the same variable in more than one resource or variablefile, and import them both, execution results may be unpredictable. That would be great if robocop will catch such problems.

[Lakitna]

I've made this for our codebase (which is proprietary, unfortunately). I did not build it in Robocop though.

Instead, I made a runtime keyword that logs all variables with duplicate values. But this only works when Robot has created the current scope (e.g. did all imports). This is why I needed to do it in the Robot runtime instead of Robocop.

While writing this I realize that we might have a small communication issue here. Are we talking about:

1. Duplicate variable names
   For example, the variable ${foo} is defined in both amazing.resource and beautiful.resource

   # amazing.resource
   *** Variables ***
   ${foo}    123

   # beautiful.resource
   *** Variables ***
   ${foo}    Hello, world!

2. Duplicate variable values
   For example, you've defined the same base URL twice:

   # amazing.resource
   *** Variables ***
   ${foo}    https://example.com

   # beautiful.resource
   *** Variables ***
   ${not_foo}    https://example.com

The second one is what I implemented in our codebase.

[bhirsz]

I believe the author of the thread is talking about 1). Which is quite unpredictable in Robot Framework. If you import resource, and it imports another, you will have hard time tracking which variable will be finally used (it depends on the order of imports etc). It's now currently possible to catch this in our linter, but maybe it would in the Robotcode (as he already finds not used keywords etc in his IDE plugin and tool). We may benefit from potential cooperation between Robocop and Robotcode.