Question

Hi here is what I what I have:

Scenario Outline: Seatching for stuff
Given that the following simple things exists:
  | id  | title                 | description                           | temp      |
  | 1   | First title           | First description                     | low       |
  | 2   | Second title          | Second description with öl            | Medium    |
  | 3   | Third title           | Third description                     | High      |
  | 11  | A title with number 2 | can searching numbers find this 2     | Exreme    |
When I search for <criteria> 
Then I should get <result>
And I should not get <excluded>

Examples
|criteria|results   | excluded  |
| 1      | 1        | 2,3,11    |
| 11     | 11       | 1,2,3     |
| title  | 1,2,3    | 11        |
| öl     | 2        | 1,3,11    |
| Fir*   | 1        | 2,3,11    |
| third  | 3        | 1,2,11    |
| High   | 3        | 1,2,11    |

As you can see I’m trying to test a search field for a web-application using cucumber and the scenario outline structure in order to test several search criteria.
I’m not sure how to handle the input I would get as result and excluded in my steps.

Maybe this doesn’t work at all?
Is there a workaround?

Answer 1

There’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing. Cucumber will just take that as a single string. The fact that it’s actually comma-separated values means nothing to Cucumber.

Your step definition would still look like this:

Then /^I should not get ([^"]*)$/ do |excluded|
    # excluded will be a string, "2,3,11"
    values = excluded.split(",")

    # Do whatever you want with the values
end