Background:
The gherkin keywords „And“ and „But“ are just like a placeholder to connect multiple main keywords (eg „Given“, „When“ and „Then“) together in a human-readable sentence.
For example, if you want to combine three given steps like this:
Given step1
Given step2
Given step3
To make it more readable, it makes more sense to combine the phrases with "And", like:
Given step1
And step2
And step3
Thus, in my opinion, „And“ is not a dedicated keyword, it's more like a replacement for a main keyword. I think this matches with the cucumber documentation and concept. See more here https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/reference/#and-but
Issue:
In CucumberSwift, the „And“ keyword is handled as an own entity, it's not used as a replacement for the keyword used in one of the previous steps. For example, given this code
:
This gherkin syntax would be totally fine and the „test“ step would be executed in every 'and' phrase:
Given step1
And test
When step2
And test
Then step3
And test
Another problem occurs when defining a 'Given' step and you want it to be used for 'And' steps:
Given(„test123“) {_,_ in}
This does not work, but in my opinion, it should. Sure, you can find workarounds like
Let step = „test123“
Func testCode() {}
Given(step) {_,_ in testCode()}
And(step) {_,_ in testCode()}
But then you would still face the first problem and your 'Given' step could be used for other keywords which might not be intented.
Suggestion:
When you parse the feature file and combine it with the matching step implementation (attachClosureToSteps) you need to check for the „and“ & „but“ keywords, and in that case search for the most-recently parsed main keyword, evaluating a match based on that. Something like that:
private func filterSteps(
keyword: Step.Keyword?,
regex: String
) -> [Step] {
var filterIndex = -1
let steps = features
.flatMap { $0.scenarios.flatMap { $0.steps } }
return steps.filter { step -> Bool in
filterIndex += 1
if let k = keyword {
if step.keyword.contains(k) {
return !step.match.matches(for: regex).isEmpty
}
if step.keyword.contains(.and) || step.keyword.contains(.but) {
let stepsBefore = steps[0..<filterIndex].reversed()
guard let nextMainStep = stepsBefore.first(where: { [Step.Keyword.given, .when, .then].contains($0.keyword) }), nextMainStep.keyword.contains(k) else {
return false
}
return !step.match.matches(for: regex).isEmpty
}
return false
} else if keyword == nil { // Is this still needed? I dont see any caller with a potential "nil" as keyword value (attachClosureToSteps)
return !step.match.matches(for: regex).isEmpty
}
return false
}
}
func attachClosureToSteps(keyword: Step.Keyword? = nil, regex: String, callback:@escaping (([String], Step) -> Void)) {
filterSteps(
keyword: keyword,
regex: regex
).forEach { step in
step.result = .undefined
step.execute = callback
step.regex = regex
}
}
This specific solution would have at least one problem. Scenario bounds will be ignored. So if you start a scenario with an 'And', it will still be valid:
scenario: 1:
Given step1
Scenario 2:
And step1
You could probably see this as a gherkin syntax fault and not make it a responsibility of CucumberSwift to handle these edge cases. But im sure there's a fix for this somewhere around...
What do you think about the problem / solution? If you think it's a solution worth to invest in I might be able to find some time in the future to create a PR.
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