Robot Framework Getting Keyword failure reason - robotframework

Question

Trying to implement a listener interface for robot framework in order to collect information about keyword executions like time taken for execution, Pass/Fail status, failure message in case if status is fail. Sample code is given below
import os.path
import tempfile
class PythonListener:
ROBOT_LISTENER_API_VERSION = 2
ROBOT_LIBRARY_SCOPE = 'GLOBAL'
def __init__(self, filename='listen.txt'):
outpath = os.path.join(tempfile.gettempdir(), filename)
self.outfile = open(outpath, 'w')
def end_keyword(self, name, attrs):
self.outfile.write(name + "\n")
self.outfile.write(str(attrs) + "\n")
def close(self):
self.outfile.close()
All the information apart from keyword failure message is available in the attributes which is passed to end_test method from robot framework.
Documentation can be found here. https://github.com/robotframework/robotframework/blob/master/doc/userguide/src/ExtendingRobotFramework/ListenerInterface.rst#id36
The failure message is available in the attributes for end_test() method. But this will not have information if a keyword is run using RunKeywordAndIgnoreError.
I could see that there is a special variable ${KEYWORD MESSAGE} in robot framework, which contains the possible error message of the current keyword Is it possible to access this variable in the listener class.?
https://github.com/robotframework/robotframework/blob/master/doc/userguide/src/CreatingTestData/Variables.rst#automatic-variables
Are there any other ways to collect the failure message information at the end of every keyword?

Answer 1

That's an interesting approach, indeed, end_test will ensure an attributes.message field containing the failure. (so it goes for end_suite if it fails during the suite setup/teardown)
With end_keyword you don't have such message, but at least you can filter for the FAIL status and detect which one failed. Then the message returned by Run Keyword And Ignore Error has to be logged explicitly by you so you can capture such triggering logs with the log_message hook. Otherwise nobody is aware of the message of the exception handled by the wrapper keyword which returns a tuple of (status, message).
There's also the message hook but couldn't manage to get it called from a normal breaking robot:
Called when the framework itself writes a syslog message.
message is a dictionary with the same contents as with log_message method.
Side note: To not expose these hooks as keywords, you can precede the method names with _. Examples:
def _end_test(self, name, attributes): ...
def _log_message(self, message): ...