Thursday, March 26, 2009

Filtering RSS feeds in Thunderbird

Now most test automation systems will generate a RSS feed of some kind; this is all well and good; but it can be a pain to read if you component is just one of many.

I wanted a filtered version of the feed that would only show up if my component had caused a test failure. It turns out you can do this in Thunderbird, the internal nature of the website rules out Yahoo Tubes et al.... Select the feed you want to get a filtered version of and do New->Saved Search.... give the feed a name and pick where you want the search to turn up. I like importatnt stuff in my inbox so that is what I choose as the location:

You can then filter based on various terms. One problem is that you can only search in the content of the RSS feed not the web page you get directed to. A colleague of mine who maintains a goodly part of the test infrastructure made a quick change to include the broken components in the feed body (Thanks to Chris Lewis for being very patient with me on this). So in my case I can simple do:

Now because we are good developers at the moment I cannot show you a screen shot with a broken test. Nor can I show you a screen grab of an another teams failure as this would be strictly against the Oracle blogging policy. :-)

No comments: