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:
    • When I follow “next” in the pagination section
    • Then I should see “logout” in the account section
  • Implementation:
    • A step like

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

    • A mapping of section names to xpaths that can be used for scoping
    • A patch of webrat is needed 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