Patterns

A draft list of useful Cucumber patterns:

• XPath Sections
  • Description: ability to scope an inspection or webrat step to a part of the html.
  • Motivation: when an element appears at multiple locations in an html page you want the ability to specify which one a step refers to
  • Examples:
    

    Then I should see “logout” in the account section

    
    

    When I follow “next” in the pagination section

  • Implementation:
    • Steps like

      When /^I follow “([^\”])" in the (.)$/

    • A mapping of section names to xpaths that can be used for scoping
    • Webrat needs a patch to allow xpaths to be used
• Easy objects
  • Description: generic step to create objects in a rails app
  • Motivation: when writing cucumber for rails, you often want to create some objects and set their properties
  • Examples:

    • Given the following People exist:
      
      | name | date of birth |
      
      | john | 20 Jan 1980   |
      
      | mary | 10 days ago   |

  • Implementation:
    • Generic step that has a model name and a table as arguments
    • Factory used to create an object for each row with the properties defined in the table
    • Transforms that map the properties to the correct type
• Relative times
• Manual steps
  • Description: have a step that indicates an action that requires a human
  • Motivation: some things can not be automatically tested (JS UI, captcha) and we still want cucumber to describe how the app should behave
  • Examples:
    

    Then /^.* \(manual step\)$/ do
    
    end

    
    

    And I fill in the captcha correctly (manual step)

  • Implementation: define a step that matches anything and a unique string that denotes a manual step