rspec users - May 2009 - [cucumber] How to DRY up table data that I'm seeing across tests ?

On 6 May 2009, at 19:28, John Goodsen wrote:
> Another thing I''m looking into is trying to hook into the visitor/
> formatting stuff and just spit out the extra data fixture data when  
> the test runs... thoughts anyone?
>
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:13 PM, John Goodsen <jgoodsen at
radsoft.com>
> wrote:
> I have the following step that I want to re-use in several  
> scenarios.  It looks like this:
>
>  When I submit the form
>    |form_field_id               |value|
>    |billingAddress.email        |mickey_mouse at test.com|
>    |billingAddress.firstName    |Mickey|
>    |billingAddress.lastName     |Mouse|
>    |billingAddress.street1      |249 Cross Road|
>    |billingAddress.city         |Sanford|
>    |billingAddress.subCountry   |ME|
>    |billingAddress.zipPostalCode|04073|
>    |billingAddress.country      |US|
>
> This step fills out a form using Selenium behind the scenes.  It''s
> been copied into several scenarios and I want to DRY it up.  I
DRY''d
> this up by moving this table data into a fixture file  
> (mickey_mouse.yml), but then the test becomes less descriptive - the  
> original scenario step above turned into a one-liner:
>
>  When I submit the form for "mickey_mouse"
>
> I think ideally, I would like some kind of "include_step" feature
in
> cucumber - where we can write partial snippets and include them  
> wherever I want.  When cucumber runs, it can replace the included  
> step.  So I could keep my tests DRY with something like:
>
>     When I submit the form
>       Include ''submit_form_for_mickey_mouse''
>
> but when I run the test, cucumber would spit out the partial  
> contents in place of the Include to make the test more descriptive.
>
> Is there anything in cucumber that would help me out right now?   
> What I''m currently looking into is hooking into the formatting and
> overriding some rendering - but it feels like a bad hack.
Why not write a wrapper step, something like

Given /I submit the billing address form with valid data/ do
   submit_form {
     :email => ''mickey_mouse at test.com'',
     :firstName => ''Mickey''} # etc
end

And call that from your feature? Do you really need to see all the  
fields in the formatted output? Are they relevant to the particular  
scenario you''re building, or just noise?

Matt Wynne
http://blog.mattwynne.net
http://www.songkick.com