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
• Debugger
  • Description: a step to go into the debugger
  • Motivation: because puts statements just don’t cut it
  • Examples:

    Given a user
    
    And debugger

  • Implementation:
    

    Then /^debugger$/ do
    
      debugger
    
    end

    
    

    >: cucumber features/test.feature 
    
    Feature: Test for debugger

Scenario: Opening a debugger # features/test.feature:2 When I go to the homepage # features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb:10

[23, 32] in /myproject/vendor/plugins/cucumber/bin/../lib/cucumber/core_ext/instance_exec.rb
23 Thread.critical = old_critical
24 end
25 begin
26 ret = send(mname, *args)
27 ensure
=> 28 InstanceExecHelper.module_eval{ remove_method(mname) } rescue nil
29 end
30 ret
31 end
32 end
/Users/tomtt/created/projects/mindapples/mindapples/vendor/plugins/cucumber/lib/cucumber/core_ext/instance_exec.rb:28
InstanceExecHelper.module_eval{ remove_method(mname) } rescue nil
(rdb:1) puts response.body.split(“\n”).select{ |l| l =~ /meta/}

nil
(rdb:1)