🧩 Improve visibility of failure screenshots in Allure Playwright reports
Problem Statement
When using allure-playwright, screenshots taken on test failure (either automatically or via custom hooks) are often attached under After Hooks.
In the Allure HTML report, this results in a poor user experience: the most important debugging artifact — the failure screenshot — is deeply nested and hard to discover.
To view a failure screenshot, I currently need to:
- Expand After Hooks
- Expand the specific hook (e.g.
screenshot-on-failure)
- Expand attachments
- Click the screenshot
This process must be repeated for every failed test, which becomes very time-consuming when reviewing large test suites in CI.
Why this matters
Screenshots are typically the first artifact users look for when diagnosing failed UI tests.
Burying them several levels deep significantly slows down failure triage and reduces the usability of the report, especially in large Playwright test suites.
Current Structure (Example)
Test Body
└─ After Hooks
└─ Fixture "attachArtifacts"
└─ Attach test artifacts
└─ screenshot
Proposed Improvements
Option A — Bubble up screenshots
Automatically surface attachments with names like "Screenshot", "Failure Screenshot", or MIME type image/* at the top level of the test result view, regardless of whether they were attached in hooks or steps.
Option B — Dedicated screenshots section
Introduce a “Screenshots” gallery / preview section at the top of the test details pane that aggregates all screenshots attached anywhere in the test lifecycle (steps, hooks, fixtures).
This would make screenshots immediately visible without changing existing attachment behavior.
Alternatives Considered
Attaching screenshots directly to the test body
Not always feasible when screenshots are created in shared fixtures or global hooks.
Manually duplicating or renaming attachments
Adds boilerplate and still does not solve discoverability at scale.
Additional Context
This is a UX improvement rather than a functional change, but it would significantly improve failure analysis workflows for teams running large Playwright test suites in CI.
🧩 Improve visibility of failure screenshots in Allure Playwright reports
Problem Statement
When using
allure-playwright, screenshots taken on test failure (either automatically or via custom hooks) are often attached under After Hooks.In the Allure HTML report, this results in a poor user experience: the most important debugging artifact — the failure screenshot — is deeply nested and hard to discover.
To view a failure screenshot, I currently need to:
screenshot-on-failure)This process must be repeated for every failed test, which becomes very time-consuming when reviewing large test suites in CI.
Why this matters
Screenshots are typically the first artifact users look for when diagnosing failed UI tests.
Burying them several levels deep significantly slows down failure triage and reduces the usability of the report, especially in large Playwright test suites.
Current Structure (Example)
Proposed Improvements
Option A — Bubble up screenshots
Automatically surface attachments with names like
"Screenshot","Failure Screenshot", or MIME typeimage/*at the top level of the test result view, regardless of whether they were attached in hooks or steps.Option B — Dedicated screenshots section
Introduce a “Screenshots” gallery / preview section at the top of the test details pane that aggregates all screenshots attached anywhere in the test lifecycle (steps, hooks, fixtures).
This would make screenshots immediately visible without changing existing attachment behavior.
Alternatives Considered
Attaching screenshots directly to the test body
Not always feasible when screenshots are created in shared fixtures or global hooks.
Manually duplicating or renaming attachments
Adds boilerplate and still does not solve discoverability at scale.
Additional Context
This is a UX improvement rather than a functional change, but it would significantly improve failure analysis workflows for teams running large Playwright test suites in CI.