Creating your own steps

All steps included in Gingerspec were created with the idea of reusability and flexibility. The problem is, that in order to achieve this, the steps must be low level enough to be used for a wide range of cases.

This is why, when trying to create a higher-level logic, many low-level steps must be combined together. Although this is not really a problem for many people, it could certainly produce very long and verbose feature files and scenarios that are harder to read and comprehend for people outside of the QA team (or even for members within the team itself). This is especially true when dealing with not very technical people such as product owners, stakeholders, etc.

Besides this, it is very common in agile environments to write the user stories (US) in a Given/When/Then format, which is later used as a template for the Gherkin steps for the QA to automate. The steps agreed during this phase tend to be very high-level and very declarative syntax

Creating your own steps

Merging low-level steps

This could certainly be the easiest way in the sense that you can just reuse the steps already contained in Gingerspec and group several of them to create a single and more high-level step

Consider the following scenario as an example. the scenario contains 4 low-level GingerSpec steps. It can be converted from this:

    Scenario: Verify that there are two main sections "Interactions" and "Widgets"
        Given My app is running in 'demoqa.com:80'
        And I browse to '/'
        When '2' elements exists with 'class:widget-title'
        And I wait '1' seconds

To this:

    Scenario: This is the same scenario as above, but in one line, using custom steps
        Given I verify the Interactions and Widgets sections are present

To accomplish this, you will have to first create the new step definition and just call the underlying java functions for the low-level steps with the correct parameters, like this:

    @Given("^I verify the Interactions and Widgets sections are present$")
    public void iVerifyTheInteractionsAndWidgetsSectionsArePresent() throws Throwable {
        seleniumGSpec.setupApp("demoqa.com:80");
        seleniumGSpec.seleniumBrowse(null,"/");
        seleniumGSpec.assertSeleniumNElementExists("at least", 2,"class","widget-title");
        utilsGSpec.idleWait(1);
    }

Remember that the java class where you create your new steps definitions must be included in the glue parameter in the runner class.

Since hunting down the underlying functions and parameters of all steps in a scenario can be a long and painstaking process, GingerSpec provides a feature that makes this process much easier. Run your tests with the -DSHOW_STACK_INFO and you will get information about the underlying java function and parameters that are being called for each gherkin step

Example:

mvn verify -Dit.test=eu.vptech.firstProject.tribe1.CucumberSeleniumIT -DSHOW_STACK_INFO

Output:

  Scenario: Verify that there are two main sections "Interactions" and "Widgets" # src/test/resources/features/tribe1/cucumber_selenium_test.feature:19
    Given My app is running in 'demoqa.com:80'
         # SeleniumGSpec.setupApp(String)
         # Argument 0: demoqa.com:80
    And I browse to '/'
         # SeleniumGSpec.seleniumBrowse(String,String)
         # Argument 0: null
         # Argument 1: /
    When '2' elements exists with 'class:widget-title'
         # SeleniumGSpec.assertSeleniumNElementExists(String,Integer,String,String)
         # Argument 0: null
         # Argument 1: 2
         # Argument 2: class
         # Argument 3: widget-title
    And I wait '1' seconds
         # UtilsGSpec.idleWait(Integer)
         # Argument 0: 1

Where:

Given My app is running in 'demoqa.com:80' -> Step being executed
         # SeleniumGSpec.setupApp(String)  -> Underlying Java method being executed and the type of each parameter 
         # Argument 0: demoqa.com:80       -> Value of first parameter

-DSHOW_STACK_INFO is only available in Gingerspec 2.0.3 and up

Creating your own step logic

of course, there will be times when the given task cannot be accomplished using merely the steps contained in Gingerspec. For such cases, you can, in the same way as abode, create your step definition and start typing your custom logic using Java code

    @Given("^I verify the Interactions and Widgets sections are present$")
    public void iVerifyTheInteractionsAndWidgetsSectionsArePresent() throws Throwable {
        /**
         * Write your java code here
         */
    }