Tabular data in Behat

All of this has happened before, and all this will happen again. -- BSG

I just watched Steve Freeman short talk "Given When Then" considered harmful (requires free login), and I was looking for some ways to cheaply eliminate duplication in Behat scenarios.

Fortunately, Behat supports Scenario Outlines for tabular data which is an 80/20 solution to transform lots of duplicated scenarios:

    Scenario: 3 is Fizz
        Given the input is 3
        When it is converted
        Then it becomes Fizz

    Scenario: 6 is Fizz too because it's multiple of 3
        Given the input is 6
        When it is converted
        Then it becomes Fizz

    Scenario: 2 is itself
        Given the input is 2
        When it is converted
        Then it becomes 2

into a table:

    Scenario Outline: conversion of numbers
        Given the input is <input>
        When it is converted
        Then it becomes <output>

        Examples:
            | input | output |
            | 2     | 2      |
            | 3     | Fizz   |
            | 6     | Fizz   |

Moreover, you can also pass tabular data to a single step with Table Nodes:

    Scenario: two items in the cart
        Given the following items are in the cart:
            | name    | price |
            | Cake    |     4 |
            | Shrimps |    10 |
        When I check out
        Then I pay 14

It takes a few minutes to learn how to do this into an existing Behat infrastructure. There are minimal changes to perform in the FeatureContext in the case of the Table Nodes, while Scenario Outlines are a pure Gherkin-side refactoring.

My code is on Github in my behat-tables-kata repository. If this reminds you of PHPUnit's @dataProvider, try to think of other patterns that can be borrowed from the xUnit world to fast-forward Cucumber and Behat development.