A gentler Cucumber Factory

Creating database records for a Cucumber scenario is painful. It involves writing a trillion steps for every model class and attribute in your app. That's why we released Cucumber Factory which does all the heavy lifting for you.

However, a common complaint with generic factory steps was that they grab too much of Cucumbers global pattern namespace. You could never again write a step definition that starts with "Given there is a..." because Cucumber would complain about ambiguous step patterns.

With the new Cucumber Factory 1.5.0 this is no longer something you need to worry about. Cucumber Factory now stays silently in the background, always preferrring your handwoven definitions. Only if none of your own step definitions match, Cucumber Factory's automagic implementation kicks in.

This also means that you can now add Cucumber Factory to your existing project without changing behavior.

Check out the new version on Github.

You can follow any response to this post through the Atom feed.

Avatar

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:01:00 GMT

by henning

5 comments

Tags:

  • Dennis said about 1 hour later:

    Hi Henning, your library looks a lot like Pickle (http://github.com/ianwhite/pickle), have you heard of it before? If so, could you explain the differences/advantages of Cucumber Factory?

    Thanks, Dennis

  • Henning Koch said about 2 hours later:

    Pickle and Cucumber Factory are two tools for the same problem.

    Personally I dislike Pickle’s syntax because I feel Cucumber steps should read like natural language. Also Pickle comes with a number of expectation steps like “Then a user should exist” which I feel promote bad practice in full-stack integration tests.

    All said I think both gems solve the problem well and you should choose the one that appeals to you most functionality-wise and aesthetically.

  • Dennis said about 4 hours later:

    Thank you, I’ll try it out!

  • Ed Jones said 11 months later:

    Wondering about this topic a year later. Pickle seems to have many recent commits, Cucumber Factory not so many. And little publicity of CF on the web.

    CF still an equal or better contender for someone just choosing a solution?

  • Henning said 11 months later:

    @Ed: Cucumber Factory only sees an occasional commit because we are quite happy with it as it is.

    Which gem you choose comes down to your personal preference – Pickle has a few more features, Cucumber Factory has more natural sounding steps. I recommend you try both and see which one suits your style.

Leave a comment