Julian Leviston wrote:
Hey Ben,
It'd be kinda cool if there was a sort of before and after for a
feature rather than each scenario. Is there?
Nope. There is no before(:all) equivalent in cucumber. Just the Before
and After hooks, which are for scenarios.. and Backgrounds which are
just for scenarios on the given feature.
(Rails context) We often need this. It'd be really helpful for things
like when we want to test about 15 things on a particular web page,
and they don't require fresh data. We end up with a login and setup
type background which gets run every time rather than simply once.
In the context of webrat a before(:all) would not help you a whole lot
since each scenario starts with a new session (so you have to login each
time, for example). I understand the argument for complex data setup
though. Having the same setup ran for each scenario can get costly. I
haven't felt enough pain though to really justify adding something like
that. Cleanup would be messy because we couldn't wrap it all in a
transaction AFAIK, so you would have to have an after(:all) like method
to clean up the feature. For complex data that I rely on all the time I
tend to load it once with fixtures at boot up time within env.rb. This
is usually for look-up data... but if you were really concerned about
record creation you could do something similar. The question is if the
additional complexity of keeping all that global state in your head
worth the faster execution time. For me it generally is not.
I guess we could refactor it into a set of examples perhaps... would
that work? It just strikes me as quite complicated. It'd be awesome if
we had sub-scenarios (and they could be specified to levels) ;-)
Perhaps I'm just being too complicated.
I would need more context to really answer your question. However, can
I ask if your scenarios are written in a declarative or imperative
fashion[1]? If they are written declaratively, or at least partly, then
you can specify a lot more behavior in a step without adding too much
noise to the scenario. Another thing I should point out is that you
don't need to, and you shouldn't, test everything on the Cucumber
level. For complex views, for example, it may be easier to do RSpec
examples (view specs) and just use Cucumber to test the basics. In
general, I'm pretty wary about sub-scenarios and the like. They could
be powerful, but they could very easily get complicated and turn
scenarios into a giant mess that only programmers could understand.
Feel free to share any ideas you have on the subject though and we'll
see what the tradeoffs are. We love throwing new ideas around on the
list. :)
I loved your rubyconf talk presentation, BTW. We kinda took exception
to the bit where you said "Selenium just works", though. There are a
number of things where the connection between selenium and webrat is a
little tenuous and finicky about.
Thanks! Yeah, the selenium adapter in webrat isn't nearly as mature as
the rails adapter. :( I haven't had a lot of issues with it, but I try
to use it as least as possible and have only really used it on simple
things. And to be honest, I haven't used it since January. So, YMMV.
Also we seem to be having timing issues for AJAX requests with
Selenium. Webrat doesn't seem to want to wait until the AJAX request
as finished before doing the next thing. Any ideas here?
I think I have seen people in #webrat on irc.freenode.net talk about
that and how they've had to add additional wait commands in. But, I
really don't know any details. Sorry! Your best bet is to ask in
#webrat, or on it's google group or lighthouse account.
-Ben
1.
http://www.benmabey.com/2008/05/19/imperative-vs-declarative-scenarios-in-user-stories/
On 29/04/2009, at 4:28 AM, Ben Mabey wrote:
Arco wrote:
I'd like to do this:
Feature: user signup
Before:
Given I have a cleaned up database
Scenario Outline: Sign Up
Given I am on the signup page
When I sign up using <userid>
Then I should see <message>
Examples:
|userid |message |
|userX |successful signup |
|userX |duplicate userid |
"I have a cleaned up database" runs before every example, making the
second example ('duplicate userid') fail.
You could use Background and it would work just like you want it to:
Feature: user signup
Background:
Given I have a cleaned up database
Scenario Outline: Sign Up
Given I am on the signup page
When I sign up using <userid>
Then I should see <message>
Examples:
|userid |message |
|userX |successful signup |
|userX |duplicate userid |
However, I would not encourage this. You should try to avoid using
technical words, such as database, in your features. If anything you
could say "Given no users exist" or something like that. Keeping
your database clean is something you generally want for every
scenario though. So I would suggest putting the code in your "Given
I have a cleaned up database" code into a Before block. The wiki has
a page on using the Before hook:
http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/hooks
Basically, in your env.rb file you will add something like:
Before do
Database.clean! # or however you clean your DB
end
HTH,
Ben
On Apr 28, 9:38 am, aslak hellesoy <aslak.helle...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Arco <akl...@gmail.com> wrote:
OK - I found a workaround. I simply tag the first scenario with
'@first', then
do Before('@first') and i get what I want - executing a block once
for
the feature file.
Except for one problem: most of my scenarios are done as
scenario
outlines, which
are run multiple times - once for each row of my Example table.
A workaround to that problem might be to put a 'dummy'
scenario that
is run before the other scenarios in my feature file...
@first
Scenario: Call a before block before running other scenarios...
But this puts junk in my feature files. Is there a better,
cleaner
way??
a) Why do you need one thing to happen before a feature?
b) Why can't you do it before each scenario?
Aslak
On Apr 28, 8:32 am, Arco <akl...@gmail.com> wrote:
I also would like a hook that executes a block once before running a
feature file.
In my testing i found that:
- Background: executes before each scenario
- Before executes before each scenario
- Before('@tag') executes before each scenario
Is there a way to execute a block once before each feature,
but not
before each scenario?
On Apr 28, 7:08 am, aslak hellesoy
<aslak.helle...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi -- is it possible to set before and after blocks for individual
feature
files?
Yes. Use tagged hooks:
http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/hooks
Aslak
I've tried putting them in step files, but they just get called
before
everything, like they'd been declared in env.rb, which is
consistent
with
how I thought cucumber worked, but I thought I'd best try it
anyway.
Anyway, I have some features that require a specific state be
set up
before
they run -- is this possible to do, and how would I go about doing
it?
Thanks for any & all help,
Doug.
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