Question

I have around 30 scenarios that all bar one require this step to be at the top of the Background:

Given I have an account:
  | name     | path     |
  | ticketee | ticketee |

For the one that doesn’t require this step it is not important that it exists or doesn’t exist, because it’s the feature for creating accounts. I can simply use a different account name and path for this.

Now, I was thinking rather than putting this in every single feature file 29 times that I could make use of the Before method in Cucumber which would mean placing a file in features/support/create_account.rb which would have this code:

Before do
  steps(%Q{
    Given I have an account:
      | name     | path     |
      | ticketee | ticketee |
  })
end

The only downside from this is that it extracts what some would think belongs in the feature to a very difficult-to-track-down location and is probably not standard. But on the other hand, it saves quite a lot of repetition.

What should I do?

Answer 1

I’d use a tagged hook such as @with_ticketee_account. It still brings a bit of repetition, but it makes the background of the scenario more obvious than having it completely hidden.

If you wanted to make it so you only have to tag the one odd scenario, maybe create a tagged hook such as @without_ticketee_account which sets a variable which your generic before filter could check for before creating the ticketee account.