dotCover 2017.1 Help

Running Coverage Analysis from the Command LIne

This topic provides several walkthroughs that would help you understand how to apply the Console Runner to your unit test projects.

In this topic:

Setting up Console Runner

To set up dotCover Console Runner on a server

  1. Do one of the following:
    • In Visual Studio, go to ReSharper | Options | dotCover | Remote Coverage and click Get Server Package. dotCover will generate an archive with all necessary files.
    • Download dotCover command line tools package from JetBrains website.
  2. Copy the archive to the machine where you are going to set up the Console Runner.
  3. Extract files from the archive to a directory, from which you are going to start the Console Runner executable file (dotCover.exe).

Optionally, you can add the path to the Console Runner executable as a system path to make the dotCover command available everywhere.

Basic scenario

The following procedure illustrates the simplest case of running coverage with the Console Runner.

To cover a Single Unit Test Project

  1. Build your unit test project.
  2. Navigate to the directory where dotcover.exe is located.
  3. Type the following command in the console:

    dotcover analyse /TargetExecutable="D:\Program Files\NUnit 2.6\bin\nunit-console.exe" /TargetArguments="D:\Projects\TheApplication\bin\Debug\AppTests.dll" /Output="AppCoverageReport.html" /ReportType="HTML"

    Where:

    • TargetExecutable: Is the path to the unit testing framework runner
    • TargetArguments: Arguments passed to the runner - the compiled unit test assembly.
    • Output: Report file name.
    • ReportType: Type of the report (in this case, we generate an HTML report)
  4. When the Console Runner exits, the AppCoverageReport.html file should appear in the same directory with the dotCover console runner. Open this file to explore the coverage results in your web browser.
  5. Alternatively, you can pass parameters in an XML file. To do so, type dotcover help analyse coverage.xml on the command line.
  6. Open the generated coverage.xml file and edit ti to specify the configuration parameters. For example, the configuration file can look as follows:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <AnalyseParams> <TargetExecutable>D:\Program Files\NUnit 2.6\bin\nunit-console.exe</TargetExecutable> <TargetArguments>D:\Projects\TheApplication\bin\Debug\AppTests.dll</TargetArguments> <Output>AppCoverageReport.html</Output> <ReportType>html</ReportType> </AnalyseParams>

  7. Type dotcover analyse coverage.xml to run the coverage with the specified parameters.

Applying filters

If the coverage report contains some information that you are not interested in, you can apply filters, which tell the Console Runner, what should be included or excluded from the coverage report.

You can specify include and exclude filters in any order. Independently of the order, Console Runner first applies include filters and then exclude filters.
If no include filters is specified explicitly, Console Runner first includes everything and then excludes what specified in exclude filters.
If there is some include filter, then Console Runner first excludes everything that does not match to include filter, and then applies explicit exclude filters, if any.

By default, whether you specify any exclude filters or not, Console Runner adds the following filters for system assemblies:

  • mscorlib
  • System
  • System.*
  • Microsoft.*

If necessary, you can disable these default filters with the DisableDefaultFilters command-line parameter.

There are two ways to specify coverage filters:

To set up coverage filters using XML configuration file

  • To exclude some items (modules, classes, methods) from the coverage report while keeping all others, add the corresponding entries to the ExcludeFilters node. For example:

    ... <Filters> <ExcludeFilters> <FilterEntry> <ModuleMask>AdditionalTests</ModuleMask> </FilterEntry> <FilterEntry> <ClassMask>MainTests.Unit*</ClassMask> </FilterEntry> <FilterEntry> <ClassMask>MainTests.IntegrationTests</ClassMask> <FunctionMask>TestFeature1</FunctionMask> </FilterEntry> </ExcludeFilters> </Filters>

    Here:

    • <ModuleMask>AdditionalTests</ModuleMask> - all tests from the corresponding module will be excluded. AdditionalTests here is an assembly name without extension.
    • <ClassMask>MainTests.Unit*</ClassMask> - all classes whose name starts with MainTests.Unit will be excluded.
    • <ClassMask>MainTests.IntegrationTests</ClassMask> <FunctionMask>TestFeature1</FunctionMask> - the TestFeature1 method of the MainTests.IntegrationTests class will be excluded. Note that FunctionMask must always contain method's short name. If you omit any element in FilterEntry, dotCover will consider this as a wildcard. For example, if you remove ClassMask in this particular case, dotCover will exclude all TestFeature1 methods (belonging to all modules and classes).

  • Alternatively, to include only the desired items while excluding all others of the same kind, add the corresponding entries to the IncludeFilters node.
  • Another option, is to filter out classes and methods based on their attributes. For example, to filter out methods marked with the System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.ExcludeFromCodeCoverageAttribute attribute, we can add the following to the coverage.xml configuration file:

    ... <AttributeFilters> <AttributeFilterEntry> <ClassMask>System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.ExcludeFromCodeCoverageAttribute</ClassMask> </AttributeFilterEntry> </AttributeFilters>

Alternatively, you can set up coverage filters using dotCover.exe command-line arguments.

To set up coverage filters using command-line arguments

  • To exclude/include items from the coverage analysis, you should run the console runner with the /Filters parameter. For example (for simplicity, we omit parameters related to the coverage target):
    dotCover.exe cover ... /Filters=-:module=AdditionalTests;-:type=MainTests.Unit*; -:type=MainTests.IntegrationTests;function=TestFeature1;

    This example is equivalent to the XML configuration example from above. Note that the semicolon (;) separates not only filter entries but also items inside filter entries.

  • An entry that starts with -: is responsible for excluding, and vice versa, an entry that starts with +: - for including.
  • If you need to exclude/include only a module, you can omit the module keyword:
    dotCover.exe cover ... /Filters=-:AdditionalTests;
  • To filter out classes and methods based on their attributes, you should use the /AttributeFilters parameter. For example, to filter out methods marked with the System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.ExcludeFromCodeCoverageAttribute attribute:
    dotCover.exe cover ... /AttributeFilters=System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.ExcludeFromCodeCoverageAttribute;

    The semicolon (;) works as a separator.

Changing scope of coverage results

By default, when the coverage snapshot is ready, it only includes information on assemblies that were loaded for analysis, i.e. the assemblies that were not filtered out and that have tests. This can make the overall coverage percentage incorrect.

If necessary, you can change the scope of assemblies whose information should be added to the snapshot. To do so, use the Scope parameter. For example, to add all assemblies from your project to the snapshot, you can add the following to the configuration file:

<Scope> <ScopeEntry>ProjectFolder/**/*.dll</ScopeEntry> <ScopeEntry>ProjectFolder/**/*.exe</ScopeEntry> </Scope>

Note that everything excluded with filters is excluded anyway regardless of the specified scopes.

Covering multiple test projects

If there are several unit test projects in your solution, you can run coverage for all of them at once as described in the basic scenario. In this case, to avoid specifying full path to each assembly, you could use the TargetWorkingDir parameter when specifying test assemblies. E.g.:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <AnalyseParams> <TargetExecutable>D:\Program Files\NUnit 2.6\bin\nunit-console.exe</TargetExecutable> <TargetArguments>AppTests.dll AppTests2.dll AppTests3.dll</TargetArguments> <TargetWorkingDir>D:\Projects\TheApplication\bin\Debug</TargetWorkingDir> <Output>AppCoverageReport.html</Output> <ReportType>html</ReportType> </AnalyseParams>

However, sometimes this approach may not work. For example, when unit test projects use different unit testing frameworks. In such cases we can breakdown the coverage, merging and reporting into individual steps.

Let's suppose that we have two unit test projects, TestProject1 that uses MSTest and TestProject2 that uses NUnit. To run coverage on both projects and get a single report, we perform the following steps:

/help/img/dotnet/2017.1/coverage_multiple_steps.png

To run coverage for multiple projects in separate steps

  1. Create two configuration files for running the cover (c) command on each of the tests projects. testProject1.xml for the TestProject1 that uses MSTest:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <CoverageParams> <TargetExecutable>C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\MSTest.exe</TargetExecutable> <TargetArguments>TestProject1.dll</TargetArguments> <TargetWorkingDir>D:\Projects\TheApplication\bin\Debug</TargetWorkingDir> <Output>Snapshot1.dcvr</Output> </CoverageParams>

    and testProject2.xml for the TestProject2 that uses NUnit:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <CoverageParams> <TargetExecutable>D:\Program Files\NUnit 2.6\bin\nunit-console.exe</TargetExecutable> <TargetArguments>TestProject2.dll</TargetArguments> <TargetWorkingDir>D:\Projects\TheApplication\bin\Debug</TargetWorkingDir> <Output>Snapshot2.dcvr</Output> </CoverageParams>

  2. Run the cover (c) command on each of the tests projects using the prepared configuration files: dotcover c testProject1.xml and dotcover c testProject2.xml. As a result you'll get two coverage snapshots, Snapshot1.dcvr and Snapshot2.dcvr.
  3. Run the merge (m) command to merge both snapshots:
    dotcover m merge.xml
    where the merge.xml is the configuration file:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <MergeParams> <Source>Snapshot1.dcvr</Source> <Source>Snapshot2.dcvr</Source> <Output>MergedSnapshots.dcvr</Output> </MergeParams>

  4. To build an HTML test report from the merged snapshots, run the report (r) command
    dotcover r report.xml
    where the report.xml is the configuration file:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ReportParams> <Source>MergedSnapshots.dcvr</Source> <Output>CoverageReport.html</Output> <ReportType>html</ReportType> </ReportParams>

Last modified: 24 August 2017