Tools

Besides the execution of the acceptance criteria of the application, SpecFlow supports the development process with further useful tools. This additional tools can be invoked through the specflow.exe command-line tool. The tool has to be parametrized from command line arguments. Executing the tool without any argument displays the possible commands. The help command can be used to display the detailed usage of the specific commands.

One part of the available tools are to provide different reports. The page Reporting discusses these options.

##Generate All

The generateall command can be used to re-generate all outdated unit test classes based on the feature file. This tool can be useful when upgrading to a newer SpecFlow version or when the feature files are modified outside of Visual Studio.

The following table contains the possible arguments for this command.

Attribute	Value	Description
projectFile		A path of the project file containing the feature files. This is a mandatory argument.
/force	-	Forces re-generation even if the generated class is up-to-date based on the file modification time and the SpecFlow generator version. Default: disabled (only outdated files are generated)
/verbose	-	Displays detailed information about the generation process. Default: disabled

The following example shows how to regenerate the unit tests for the BookShop sample application.

specflow.exe generateall BookShop.AcceptanceTests.csproj

The generateall command can be also invoked from MsBuild. This way the unit test files can be updated before compiling the solution. This can be useful if the feature files are regularly modified outside of Visual Studio. See Generate Tests from MsBuild for details.