Tutorial 17 – Pass string to step definition (Behave BDD)
Welcome to the 17th article in Behave BDD series!
What you will Learn :
Python debugger pdb
Pass string to step definition
Example 2
Add breakpoint in step definition
‘pdb’ is the python debugger. We can utilize it to add breakpoints in step definition files. To use the pdb module, we have to first import it, see line number 2 below
Let us say we want to add a breakpoint @when (line#9) seen above. We can do that by adding the line pdb.set_trace() anywhere before @when, see below
Let us open the terminal and execute the feature file
Notice above that the script pauses at @when and we enter the (pdb) command prompt.
Type letter ‘l’ and hit enter, you would see the arrowmark pointing to @when
Pass string to step definition file
Look at the below feature file. We have added a string just after ‘Given’ step. Let us see how to pass this string to step definition file
Let us first look at the step definition file, see below. Make sure to import the pdb module
Notice line number 8.
To access the string from feature file to step definition, we are capturing the output of context.text in a variable. We have also added a breakpoint.
Let us now execute the feature file by using the tagname, see below
Notice the output of capture_text variable. It is the same string that we wrote in feature file. So this string is captured in the variable and we can use this string in our step definition file as desired.
Example 2
Let us now put another string, but this time in the form of an array, see below
Import json module in stepdefinition file
Capture json data in my_array variable, also add a breakpoint, see below
Let us now run the feature file
json.loads(context.text) returns us the json dictionary (having key:value pairs coming from feature file).
We can now print the value of any key, example ‘username’.
So my_array[‘username’] returns the respective value ‘testuser1’.
We can now use these values as desired in our step definition file.
Thank you for reading!
