From the course: Robot Framework Test Automation: Level 2

Getting help from other Robot Framework users - Selenium Tutorial

From the course: Robot Framework Test Automation: Level 2

Getting help from other Robot Framework users

- [Instructor] In the level one course, I introduced you to several user groups at Google and LinkedIn where you could get assistance with your Robot Framework questions. Here I'd like to show you one of the more modern ways of getting in touch with other Robot Framework users, and that's the Robot Framework Slack channel. So if you navigate to RobotFramework.org and click on Support & Contact, you'll see several options, one of which is this Slack Community link. And when you click that link, a second window opens up and allows you to get your invitation. So just type in your email address and click on Get My Invite. And now it's prompting you to check your email. And when you do that, you'll get an email that has an automatic invitation. So click the Join Team button. And if you don't yet have a Slack account, you can create an account now. Type in your first name and a username, all lowercase with no spaces. And click Next. Now you can specify your password and click on Join Team. And now if everything goes well, you are now officially a Slack user, and you have access to the Robot Framework Slack Channel. Notice it has a little banner up here that says that there's a Slack Windows app that you could use instead of the browser. And if you take a look at the URL up here you are in RobotFramework.slack.com. So it's a sub-domain on the Slack website, which is specifically about Robot Framework. If you click on the drop down up here, you can update your profile and account and preferences, and you can also see statistics about this community. You can see that there are 26,000 total messages. 62% are public and 37% direct messages. There are 388 files stored within this community. And if you click on that link, you can see a list of all files from everyone, or you can see files that were posted by a specific user or just yourself. Different kinds of file types here. And if you hit the back button and scroll down on the statistics page, you'll see that there are 814 people currently in the community, and you could upgrade to a paid tier if you want to see more statistics. Back here on the main landing page, there's a search feature, and when you type in a search term you also have things like after a certain date or before a certain date, whether it's starred, or from a particular user. But if you have a general question, like Python 3 for instance, hit return, you notice it pops open this little search bar here, and you've got both messages and files somehow pertaining to Python 3. And as you scroll down, you see some of the messages along with dates. And right here on October 25th, 2016, you can see that somebody's saying that someone in two library doesn't yet support Python 3, but there is a fork which has been converted to Python 3. So you can get some very timely information by doing a search. Obviously, if for some reason you can't find what you're looking for, then you can post a message directly to the community itself. And notice here when you first land, I'm on direct messages slackbot. This is a bot that you can ask specific questions to about how to use the system. If you want to post messages to the community though, you go up here into the channels section. And notice that general and random show by default, but if you hover over this, it says there's 18 channels, and you can browse all channels. And you can sort the channels by name of creator or creation dates, members, most to fewest, and so on. As we scroll through here, you can see that there are subsections of communication going on within the Robot Framework Slack Community. And on the right side here, you can see how many members there are participating in each channel. So notice there's a Python channel, and if we click on this, now Python is showing over here, and we see the messages relevant to Python. Most current messages are at the bottom. So if we scroll up a ways, we can see some history. Once I navigate away from this, I'm only going to see general and random again. So if I want this to permanently be a fixture in my channels view, I just click on this Join Channel button down here at the bottom. And in order to post a message, I can just click here and start typing, or I can click on the plus sign and specify whether I want to do code or text, attach a Google Docs file, or post, which is really kind of creating like a blog post. And I could use this to actually import something from Google Drive or my computer. You can also drag and drop to this window directly from your computer. Instead of posting in a relatively small channel, you might just consider posting in general because that's where most people are going to looking. And you can see that yesterday there's a little bit of action in general. And if I scroll up, you can see all this action here took place on November fourth. And of course, the further up you scroll, November third. And you can keep going back further and further in time. After you've posted the message, if you want to be able to follow up on it later, you can go ahead here and then click on the star. And now essentially you've told Slack that you want to follow this conversation. And anytime you want to come back and check up on any activity, you can jump up here to the top right and click on star, and you'll see a list of all starred items with their activity. If anybody mentions you in comments using the @ sign, you can go and click here to see a list of all reactions or mentions that contain your user ID. If you want to scan through the people who are a part of this community, you can simply click on this little drop down up here, and notice it allows you to see all of your files, help, what's new, things like that, but team directory is what you're looking for. Click on this. And within a couple seconds, a scrollable team directory will load up. You could click in here to search for a specific user name, and it allows partial searches. So this is a great way to discover other Robot Framework users.

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