Comments on: DRY up your Cucumber Steps

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:53:01 +0000

I agree Arnaud, it would be better if these mappings were surfaced in Gherkin. However it’s not easy to do technically, so it’s hasn’t been implemented yet. I hope it will happen eventually, but we might have to wait for Cucumber 2.0!

By: Arnaud Meuret

Arnaud Meuret — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:15:06 +0000

Yes reusing Gherkin steps in the step definitions was a huge progress. However I really miss the matching feature in Gherkin space. RSpec has its Shared Examples feature and I have always wondered why the Cucumber team never wanted to augment Gherkin to allow a better behaviour factoring.

Isolating the stakeholders from the programming language is one of the main justification of Cucumber so why are we forced to enter the step definition space to get a nice feature like nested specifications ?

An example is here: https://gist.github.com/1084580

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:45:03 +0000

@Jairo: according to https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber/blob/master/History.md it was first added in v0.1.7

By: Jairo Diaz

Jairo Diaz — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:54:54 +0000

I am working on a legacy application with an old cucumber version. From what version does Cucumber support nested steps?

By: Mark’s Link Blog » links for 2009-06-09

Mark’s Link Blog » links for 2009-06-09 — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:05:52 +0000

[...] blog.mattwynne.net : DRY up your Cucumber Steps (tags: testing cucumber bdd tdd dry) [...]

By: Paul Jensen

Paul Jensen — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:59:41 +0000

Thanks for the post, I was in the same place of reusing steps for testing user authentication with authlogic.

By: Alexis Perrier

Alexis Perrier — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 08:06:53 +0000

Thanks a lot, very useful. A must have if your serious about testing I was trying to find your article using “cucumber nested given” on google which didn’t work. So I thought i’d add the keywords in the comment.

By: Robby on Rails : 20 articles on Cucumber and a free beverage recipe!

Robby on Rails : 20 articles on Cucumber and a free beverage recipe! — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:32:45 +0000

[...] DRY up your Cucumber Steps, Matt Wynne [...]

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:36:27 +0000

Hi Wes,

It definitely sounds like Background would fit well for you - you can set up the data in the background then carry out different actions on it in different scenarios. The advantage of doing this is your tests are very clear about the data being set up. The disadvantage is that you can't vary that data at all in the different scenarios. Spelling out the data to use can also be a bit noisy - sometimes the specific data you use doesn't matter - you just want the general sense of the state of the system.

See this excellent post by Ben Mabey on that subject.

By: Wes

Wes — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:00:12 +0000

i know this thread is old but what about scenarios that require reuse of a set of data. My example is a set of flights. I have several scenarios for delaying, canceling, or other scheduling based actions that all need a set of flights over time that are affected by the actions. I would like to define this set in one place and reuse them in the different scenarios probably using a Background: type given scenario. Is there a way to do this or a better suggestion for handling this?