Azure DevOps: ReportGenerator vs PublishCodeCoverageResults

[bhuwan-agarwal]

I'm trying to understand the difference between the code coverage reports generated via the PublishCodeCoverageResults vs ReportGenerator Azure pipeline extension tasks. From the initial impressions they look quite the same.

Any details will be helpful?

[danielpalme]

As long as you want the coverage results of a single Cobertura file and you don't want to use any of the parameters of the ReportGenerator Azure pipeline extension task, you probably won't notice any difference.

If you want to use the latest version of ReportGenerator or if you want to to use specify any parameters, you should use the ReportGenerator Azure pipeline extension task.

The main issue with the PublishCodeCoverageResults task is, that it regenerates the HTML report based on the supplied Cobertura file and ignores the HTML files generated by ReportGenerator.
This may result in unexpected behavior. See:

• Publish code coverage task overrides ReportGenerator filters microsoft/azure-pipelines-tasks#10354
• Mismatch between Branch Coverage in Cobertura and HTML reports #393
• Seems filters don't work #240

You can prevent the report regeneration with the following environment variable:

disable.coverage.autogenerate: 'true'

The environment variable is not well documented and the default behavior is not what users may expect.

How to decide

ReportGenerator Azure pipeline extension task	PublishCodeCoverageResults
- Latest version of ReportGenerator - Support for parameters (e.g. filters) - Support for merging several coverage files	Easy to setup for a single coverage file