Question

Does anyone know its its possible to define a table once in a .feature file & then access it from multiple scenarios? I’m not chaining scenarios but many of them do need to pass tables with the same data to their step definitions – also for this reason examples won’t really do what I need here.

Thanks!

Answer 1

One possible solution is to tag all your scenarious where you need a table:

@given_have_table
Scenario: test
  Then I am happy

Then bind Before hook to this tag and call step that declares your table from within Before hook definition:

Before("@given_have_table") do
  steps Q%{
  Given I have the following table:
    | a | b |
    | 1 | 2 |
  }
end

Alternative approach is to construct required table in tagged Before hook without calling step:

Before("@given_have_table") do
  @tbl = { :a => 1, :b => 2 }
end