Updates:
Status: Pending
Comment #1 on issue 860 by pekka.klarck: DryRun mode fails when using
BuiltIn library to set variables
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/issues/detail?id=860
What actually fails here? Set Test Variable (or any other keyword in any
library) should not even be executed in the dry-run mode so I'm really
surprised if that fails somehow. Since the keyword is not run the variable
is obviously not assigned but that's as expected -- variables cannot
generally be assigned without executing keywords.
Does your second keyword use embedded arguments syntax and fail because
${VAR1} doesn't exist? If that's the case, then the problem is handling
embedded arguments in the dry-run mode. That would be a bug and probably
could be fixed relatively easily.