Custom logging? (during test execution; not as a post-processed file)

[jazzdelightsme]

I'm testing some code that has its own logging (one powershell session ==> one log file).

I'd like to have Pester information logged to the same destination, as Pester is executing. That way, when I read my log file, I see things like "Describing " that come before the logging generated during that test. That will aid me in debugging what happened when a test failed (I will be able to tell what section of the log to investigate).

I can currently do this by hand by just putting lines like "Write-ToMyLog 'Now executing foo test'" into my test scripts, but it becomes pretty cumbersome and it would be cool to be able to have Pester do it.

[jazzdelightsme]

Related: it would be helpful for doing this manually if there were a way to access the descriptions of the Describe/It blocks.

For example, it could look something like this:

    It "can crack string templates" {
        Write-ToCustomLog "Testing: it $ItBlockDescription"
        ...

(which would yield "Testing: it can crack string templates" in the custom log)

[jazzdelightsme]

(and that would allow further simplification, like this:

    BeforeEach {
        Write-ToCustomLog "Testing: it $ItBlockDescription"
    }

)

[nohwnd]

There is no built in mechanism to inject code inside of It or other blocks. Also there are no automatic variables that would publish names of the current test or the name of the current block. Getting the name of the current test used to be possible, by simply looking at the $Name variable inside of It. This also caused numerous bugs and confusions, so the code where user code runs was moved to a different scope than the code where Pester code runs. Thanks to that you no longer get $Name collisions.

• You have two workarounds that you can use: Save the name of the test to a variable and pass it to the It block as well as to your logging code.
• Use InModuleScope look inside of Pester module scope and inspect all variables that are available. The one that you are looking for should be called Name and be available inside of It.

Personally, I would simply mock my logging function and write the logging information to screen. That way I would see what is happening in the script as well as the outcome of tests.

[dlwyatt]

I kind of like the idea of having some automatic Pester variables, similar to $node in DSC, etc. However, I wouldn't want to add even more hard-coded assumptions about the Describe / Context / It structure, which is becoming less rigid in v4. Still, something to think about. :)

[nohwnd]

This is related to #318, I won't add it to the intial release of v5 to let the internals stabilize.