Robotframework: behavior when teardown fails - robotframework

Question

I'm trying to understand how Robot behaves when there is a failure in Test teardown.
Conceptually, I would think that if a test case completes execution, it should be considered passed. Teardown is not part of the test, so if there is a failure in teardown, the test case should still be marked as passed. The behavior I observe is that if test teardown fails, the test case fails. Is this what is supposed to happen, and is there any way to change it?
I'm also seeing something weird when Suite teardown fails.
The console output shows the test case as passed, displaying |PASS| next to the case. However, the statistics at the bottom of the output show all cases as failed.
Here's an example:
*** Settings ***
Suite Teardown Teardown
*** Keywords ***
Setup
Log to Console setup
Teardown
Should Be Equal 1 2
*** Test Cases ***
case1
[Setup] Setup
Log To Console case
and the output:
==============================================================================
Test
==============================================================================
case1 setup
.case
case1 | PASS |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Test | FAIL |
Suite teardown failed:
1 != 2
1 critical test, 0 passed, 1 failed
1 test total, 0 passed, 1 failed
==============================================================================
This is just confusing. The test passes, and is shown as passed, but is marked as failed in the stats. Is this a bug, or is there some way to fix it?

Answer 1

Sometimes the test fails in tear down is an important issue, for example, the clean up is not completed and it causes other test cases to fail. Therefore robot framework always reports FAIL if the test case fails in tear down. Use Run Keyword And Ignore Error if the keyword failure is not an issue to your test case:
*** Keywords ***
Teardown
Run Keyword And Ignore Error Should Be Equal 1 2
However you should be careful that if the keyword fails, nothing is reported unless you check the detail in output logs.
The suite tear down runs after all test cases finished. The first test case is passed and program prints PASS. After that, the suite tear down runs and it fails, so the program prints FAIL. This is expected result. It is easier to understand if there are more test cases in one suite, for example:
Test suite A
run case 1 ----> print PASS
run case 2 ----> print PASS
run case 3 ----> print PASS
run suite teardown ----> print FAIL (and change case 1, 2, 3 to FAIL)
And tear down fail is the same as test case fail in robot framework, therefore robot framework reports all test cases fail in the end. Check the output log.html, you can see that all test cases are FAIL.

Answer 2

I figured out a solution that may or may not be useful. We have a Jenkins integration and Jenkins will report all these test failures that I want to see as passed. What I did was not generate the html from robot, just the xml.
I then used etree to create a new test xml tag.
def create_test(id= 'sx-tx', name='Test'):
return ET.Element("test", attrib={'id': id, 'name': name})
I copied the teardown internals to the new test and used 'rebot' to generate the xml from the new xml. This made Teardown a test so it showed only a single failure.
I can elaborate if you would like.