This sounds really strange. I don't see how argument files would affect this, as they
are handled before actually passing arguments to RF. Your case should be 100%
equivalent to 

pybot ^
 --name My_Test_Name ^
 --variable Var1:Value1 ^
 --variable Var2:Value2 ^
 --variable Var3:Value3 ^
 ../../TestsToRun.html


Could you double check is there possibly something else wrong in your setup? You
could e.g. try running the same suite without argument files. If the problem isn't in
your setup, could you please create a minimal example suite and start-up script that
demonstrates the problem and attach them here as a zip package?

I think this is because robot can't process multiple argfiles (at least according to 
the command line help), so only the first one is read. It would be a good enhancement 
to allow multiple argument files though, as this comes in handy in a lot of 
situations.

The user guide says nothing about not handling multiple argument files and, when you 
use multiple files, pybot does not complain.  However it really does fail to process 
the 2nd file.  See the attached example.  If you run the PC tests with Issue_230
\Product_Name\RobotFrameworkTests\Test_Suite\RunTests\PC\Debug_PC_Product_V1_Tests.ba
t or Issue_230
\Product_Name\RobotFrameworkTests\Test_Suite\RunTests\PC\Debug_PC_Product_V2_Tests.ba
t then everything works fine.  In those .bat files the variables that I would set in 
the 2nd argument file are directly done on the pybot command line, like Peke's 
example above.  If you run the PC tests with Issue_230
\Product_Name\RobotFrameworkTests\Test_Suite\RunTests\PC\Debug_PC_Product_V1_Tests_2A
rgFiles.bat or Issue_230
\Product_Name\RobotFrameworkTests\Test_Suite\RunTests\PC\Debug_PC_Product_V2_Tests_2A
rgFiles.bat then the issue described above occurs and the tests fail.

Issue_230.zip 110 KB   Download

It's not in the user guide (should be), but if you do a "pybot -h" and look at the 
usage information, you'll see that arguments that can be specified more that once are 
listed with an asterisk (*), and that the --argumentfile option does not have an 
asterisk.

Chris is correct in his analysis, --argumentfile is accepted only once as denoted
with that '*'. I really don't know why it is implemented like that (even though I'm
the one who has implemented it.....) and it ought to be relatively easy to change the
behavior. This also should be documented better, but if we are anyway going to change
it updating the documentation isn't worth the effort.

Tests commited in r1338, changes to argument parser in r1339, and updated start-up
scripts in r1340.

If you want to get this feature into use, you can just copy the updated
argumentparser.py over existing 2.0.4 installation. You can get r1339 version of
argument parser directly from
http://robotframework.googlecode.com/svn-history/r1339/trunk/src/robot/utils/argumentparser.py

I'll still add a note to User Guide that starting from 2.1 --argumentfile can be
given multiple times but I'll close this already now. UG updates are likely to be in
r1341.

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