Levy Carneiro

Here’s a tip for creating a generic Cucumber step, handling the Webrat visit method.

Imagine you have many Cucumber scenarios, and you have many steps like these:

  Given I am on the new task page
  Given I am on the new project page
  Given I am on the home page

This way you’d have to create mapping between these strings above, to real paths inside the application. You could use the method ‘path_to’, which is already provided with Cucumber, inside features/support/paths.rb. That could lead to something like this:

# features/support/paths.rb

def path_to(page_name)
  case page_name

  when /new task/i
    new_task_path
  when /tasks/i
    tasks_path

  when /new user/i
    new_user_path
  when /users/i
    users_path

  when /home/i
    root_path

  # and so forth...

  else
    raise "Can't find mapping from \"#{page_name}\" to a path."
  end
end

Or you could use something more generic and more maintanable.

So, let’s take advantage of the path helpers already provided by Rails such as new_task_page, tasks_path, home_path, and do this instead:

  Given I am on the new_task page
  Given I am on the new_project page
  Given I am on the home page

And add this to your create_task_steps.rb:

# features/step_definitions/create_task_steps.rb

Given /^I am on the (.+) page$/ do |page_name|
  eval("visit #{page_name}_path")
end

This way Webrat will visit the path: new_page_path, and you won’t have to maintain the paths.rb file.