Capture summary output

[philippkarg]

Is it possible to capture the summary that is posted by the action to GitHub Actions and, e.g., put it into a file?

[2bndy5]

Its an interesting idea. What is your intended use case?

The step-summary feature is simply appending the comment (without the length limit imposed upon the thread-comment feature) into a file located in the path described by GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY.

So, I think it might be possible to parse that step summary markdown file and extract the comment, which always

• starts with <!-- cpp linter action -->\n
• ends with a link to our issue tracker Have any feedback or feature suggestions? [Share it here.](https://github.com/cpp-linter/cpp-linter-action/issues)

[philippkarg]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'm trying to post the comment to a PR on push events in a private repo using this action: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/add-pr-comment

How would I parse the file? From what I understood, these step summary files are unique for each step, so I can't really access the linter's summary in a subsequent step, can I?
I'm relatively new to GitHub Actions so sorry for any obvious confusions.

[2bndy5]

How would I parse the file? From what I understood, these step summary fils are unique for each step

I wondered this too. I'm not sure if it is possible. I was hoping the file would persist among steps in the same job. Clearly this idea would take some experimentation. The GH docs aren't always as forthcoming as they should be; AI has not improved that either.

I'm trying to post the comment to a PR on push events in a private repo

A few follow-up questions: Does cpp-linter-action not run on this private repo? Is the source being scanned a separate repo from the private repo?

I suppose it would be simple enough to export the comment to a file specified be a new input. We're also considering a way to export SARIF data.

[philippkarg]

I'm on GitHub Enterprise so the API calls don't work I think. The step summary & file annotations work, but not the PR comment (as mentioned in your docs).

I've tried printing the summary file in the step after the linting step and it's empty. I guess they just create a separate temporary file for each step or something.

Would it be an option to add an input to store the report in a file? I've seen that you are moving to a Rust implementation, where I can't really help unfortunately. For the Python version I would be happy to have a go and create a PR.

[2bndy5]

Feel free to submit a PR to the python cpp-linter/cpp-linter repo. I can port whatever solution we land into rust. As this feature wouldn't actually require any REST API, it could probably just get incorporated into the same code that writes to GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY. It would require a new unit test though.

[2bndy5]

Feature request satisfied in v1.13.0 and deployed to pypi. Thanks for your contribution in #206 !