Hello, i helped implement async in robot. You shouldn't need to grab the context to work with async, can you elaborate more on what Robot is not being able to do? Like example of such keywords that is not being able to get the results.

Hello,
running async keywords is not a problem. What I'm trying to do is run async functions inside get_keyword_names, get_keyword_arguments, etc.

as an example:

*** Settings ***
Library  test_async.py

*** Test Cases ***
Test 1
    async_keyword

library:

from asyncio import sleep

class test_async:
    async def get_keyword_names(self):
        await sleep(1)
        return ["async_keyword"]

    async def async_keyword(self):
        await sleep(1)
        return "test"

When you try to start this test you will get:

Error in file '....\tests\async\test_async.robot' on line 2: Getting keyword names from library 'test_async' failed: Calling dynamic method 'get_keyword_names' failed: Return value must be a list of strings.
c:\Users\PawelWisniewski\ExecutionPlatform\ep\venv-3.10\lib\site-packages\robot\running\namespace.py:71: RuntimeWarning: coroutine 'test_async.get_keyword_names' was never awaited
  item.report_invalid_syntax(err.message)
RuntimeWarning: Enable tracemalloc to get the object allocation traceback

Ah i see, these methods that are available for a dynamic library must be normal functions as specified in the interface: https://github.com/robotframework/robotframework/blob/master/src/robot/api/interfaces.py#L104

In the example you gave, it should be like this:

from asyncio import sleep

class test_async:
    def get_keyword_names(self):
        return ["async_keyword"]

    async def async_keyword(self):
        await sleep(1)
        return "test"

Every method in that interface must be a normal function too. If you need to run something async in those normal methods, i would suggest you use asyncio.run(). An example would be:

import asyncio

class test_async:
    def get_keyword_names(self):
        asyncio.run(asyncio.sleep(1))
        return ["async_keyword"]

    async def async_keyword(self):
        await asyncio.sleep(1)
        return "test"

I would try to avoid this however, because resources would have a separate event loop that get's closed once run is done. This is not a problem if the coroutine return resources that are not attached to the event loop, like primitive types for example.

TLDR: The methods in the interface must be normal functions. If you need to run an async function inside those and it returns something that don't require the event loop anymore, just use asyncio.run(). Otherwise avoid this and try to run that async function elsewhere.

May have found a way to make it async, follow the PR.

Thank you for looking at it. This works as expected.

This looks like a good enhancement and the implementation in the PR looks good as well. The PR lacks tests, though, and I believe this should also be mentioned in the User Guide. We are currently developing RF 7 with a plan to get it out in early December. I hope we could get this and #4808 done before that!

Implemented by PR #4836. Thanks for another great contribution @ygorpontelo!

Issue #4089 that added the initial async support was given a high priority and I guess this issue deserves it as well. Priorities don't matter much with issues that are already done, but this way we remember to mention this in the release notes.

It would be interesting to hear what kind of use cases you @WisniewskiP have for the async dynamic API.

Thanks for adding it to RF.

We are using RF as frontend to our testing device. it is communicating over network similar to remote lib, but we are using async framework for this communication because we need concurrent access and authentication.