I would recommend using Geb, a groovy library for driving browsers. It sits on top of Selenium.

I talked about it at SkillsMatter a while back, check out:
http://www.rapaul.com/2011/01/26/agile-acceptance-testing-with-geb/
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/acceptance-testing-with-geb

I didn’t think properties would be readily available to other steps. But, given what we’re trying to do in our project I thought it might be useful. We seem to be trending towards a monolithic definition file for our tests (vs. lots of copy-paste of similar behavior into separate files).

I will check out the Google group. I figured there had to be a forum out there somewhere. I just hadn’t come across it. I’ll go bug those guys. :)

Thanks again.

If you left the type off the variable it would instead be bound to the script binding and be available in all groovy scripts but I don’t think this is a tidy approach. I would try to avoid stateful steps, and if they are necessary try to co-locate them in a single step definition file.

It might be better to voice this to a wider audience on the Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/cukes

Cheers,
Richard

The error says the property is of course missing in steps2. So, I tried to be clever with something like:

Then(~”I get (.*)”) { String expected ->
assert steps1.value == expected
}

Then it says the property is missing from steps1. (I also tried to use the mixin of the steps1 definition…which also failed).

…My newbie-ness must be blinding.

I believe I have the project layout correct. I can reference steps in multiple groovy files with no problem. However, when I try to reference the ‘value’ property in steps1.groovy from steps2.groovy (as noted above) then I get the following error:

groovy.lang.MissingPropertyException: No such property: value for class: steps1 (NativeException)

The ‘value’ property is successfully accessed in the Given and When (in steps1.groovy) but the exception occurs in the Then (in steps2.groovy).

So, I wasn’t sure what the accessibility/scope rules were. More accurately, I wasn’t sure how cucumber was handling multiple files (i.e. do they get aggregated into one class or does it simply “search” through the steps in various definitions until it finds a match).

Thanks again!

I will quite often have a step definition file that has common functionality used across many different aspects of the site. The various scenarios reference them without problem.

Make sure you have the groovy files inside the step_definition directory, check http://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cuke4duke/tree/master/examples/groovy-webdriver/features/ for an example project layout.

One (very basic) question I have is how do you reuse/inherit/reference various .groovy files? For example:

//step1.groovy
this.metaClass.mixin(cuke4duke.GroovyDsl)

String value

Given(~”I have the value (.*)”) { String val ->
value = val
}

When(~”I concatenate (.*)”) { String val ->
value += val
}

//steps2.groovy
this.metaClass.mixin(cuke4duke.GroovyDsl)

Then(~”I get (.*)”) { String expected ->
//How do I access ‘value’?
assert value == expected
}

//some.feature
Feature: fooBar

Scenario: Accessibility
Given I have the value foo
When I concatenate Bar
Then I get fooBar

Obviously this is a very basic example but as we produce more and more steps/features/scenarios it would be useful to group or reuse some of our step definitions. I can’t seem to find documentation on how to do that and all of my attempts at guessing have failed.

Thanks!

with: