DRY Cucumber scaffolded CRUD steps or scenarios

Question

When creating Cucumber tested Rails apps using TDD it would be useful to have a reusable set of steps or scenarios which could be applied to any model which test the core CRUD steps.

I often find I scaffold the initial CRUD and then iterate on top of that, and it would be good to have the core functionality tested until I do.

Likewise the steps themselves could be iterated upon to handle any bespoke functionality as and when it's added.

Does this exist, or are there any guides on how to create this kind of thing?

It feels like there should be a generator gem for this.

As an aside this kind of thing could be really useful for Cucumber beginners to give them a sense of what a good set of steps looks like.

Answer 1

I don't think there's a gem for that, but you can do this by yourself with steps like:

Then /^I create a "([^"]*)" with:$/ do |entity, table|
  create_entity entity, table
end

def create_entity( entity, table)
  table.rows_hash.each do |field, value|
    fill_field_with field, value
  end
end

And do the following:

When I create a "User" with:
  | Name      | John |
  | Last Name | Doe  |

Implementing fill_field_with can be a bit tricky. First, all 'entities' should have a uniform way of creating / editing / destroying. And for filling the fields themselves you have to consider that the fields can be checkboxes, selects and simple texts. For most kind of fields this works:

Capybara::fill_in field, {:with => value, :match => :prefer_exact}

Summary: It's not straightforward but it's doable.