The family keyword is used to create a new family inside a suite or inside another family. The only implicit action is to terminate the previous task definition.
The only parameter this keyword takes is the name of the new family to be defined.
The definition of a family must be terminated by either endfamily or endsuite or by the end of the suite definition file.
A family is used to collect tasks together or to group other families. Typically you place tasks that are related to each other inside the same family, analogous to the way you create directories to contain related files.
Sometimes it is useful to group a set of tasks into a family to get the trigger dependencies cleaner, e.g. you might have ten tasks that all need to be complete before the eleventh task can run, as in the following definition file.
| Wiki Markup |
|---|
family f |
...
task t0 |
...
family ff |
...
task t1 |
...
... |
...
task t10 |
...
endfamily |
...
task t11 |
...
trigger ff==complete |
...
endfamily |