Story attribute auto-adds "As a", etc if not already in the string value

[jason-roberts]

Not sure if this would be a useful shortcut for story writers, but as an idea:

[Story( AsA = "As a Customer",
           IWant = "I want to log-in",
           SoThat="So that I can place a new order" )]

Could instead be written:

[Story( AsA = "Customer",
           IWant = "to log-in",
           SoThat="I can place a new order" )]

The "As a", "I want", and "So that" strings will be auto-added if they aren't already present at the start of the strings for these properties.

This would reduce the typing that dev has to do when using this attribute and I feel that it also improves the readability.

[mwhelan]

Hi Jason

I think that's a great idea. I really appreciate those sorts of shortcuts myself.

One thing Mehdi and I have discussed, is that another popular format is "In order to, As a, I want." We have considered providing the flexibility of choosing the story format you want, or creating your own. For example, when I use BDDfy for unit tests I would use a different heading again from the story formats and it would be nice to be able to customize that. What do you think?

Thanks for your suggestions. We appreciate the feedback.

[jason-roberts]

That's funny - I was also going to create a new issue suggesting the same thing "in order..." :)

Another option would be to just make this a free text description, perhaps the Story attribute could take DescriptionLine1...DescriptionLine5 to allow maximum flexibility? Unless this information in the Story attribute needs to be treated in a strongly-typed way elsewhere in the codebase?

[MehdiK]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Every time I use BDDfy I do want to drop those redundant words from the beginning of the story properties; to be honest with you I have just been lazy and also thought I may be the only one. Now that at least there are two more people thinking like me I guess we'll do it :) There's another reason too: sometimes you want "As an" instead of "As a"; e.g. "As an accountant". Anyhow, I just coded this and sent a PR without the smarts to use "As an" if needed.

WRT your second question: No these names are only used as placeholders and can be named anything and we did think of doing something more generic; but we couldn't come up with a decent generic alternative; e.g.

[Story(
    DescriptionLine1 = "In order to do something",
    DescriptionLine2 = "As a blah",
    DescriptionLine3 = "I want something")]

I personally don't like this. As an alternative solution we could create a StoryAttributes per variation; e.g. InOrderToStory for the abovementioned variation.

[MehdiK]

This was just released to NuGet as v3.19.1