[Guidance/Documentation] Message Bus Artifacts

[thomhurst]

In the new testing platform, when using the message bus, apart from the main use of publishing test node updates, there's also a few other things we can publish out of the box, mainly being artifact objects.

I can't see any documentation on these so just wondered:

• What the idea/use case/general direction for usage for these would be?
• If I pushed an artifact to the message bus, what would (and how would it) appear and where? Would an IDE show me a file? Would the dotnet cli give me a path to some outputs?
• What do you see as a Session artifact? Maybe like an overall report or something? And what would you consider as a test node artifact? Maybe a UI test that took screenshots or videos? Again, if this was the case, how would these be reported/displayed back to the user?

So overall this issue is for better documentation around artifacts and how you envision any framework creators using them.

[Evangelink]

Thanks for the feedback, we will definitely improve this part of the documentation.

there's also a few other things we can publish out of the box, mainly being artifact objects.

You can virtually push any object to the push but for it to have any sense, you need to have some subscriber registered.

What do you see as a Session artifact?

A code coverage report is a session level artifact, it's attached to the test session and not to a given test. On the opposite, with MSTest, you can attach specific arbitrary documents to a given test, doing so we would push a TestNodeFileArtifact.