Behat Variables

Stores your custom variables across Scenarios during Feature testing.

The idea

You're making users and profiles to test, and you want to use those creations further in the same Feature. You can't, because: 1) Behat arguments are literals, and 2) FeatureContext lives only for every Scenario, not for the entire Feature.

With behat-variables, you can save & use those variables: user ids, passwords, activation tokens, etc.

Given a new user "Fred"           # Your custom step, with a return value
And I save it into "UID"          # A provided step that saves that return value
When I go to "/users/<<UID>>"     # Custom step, with dynamic argument
Then I should see "Hello, Fred!"  # Custom step, with predictable content

The <<UID>> part is the magic. Works for any argument, not just URIs.

Set up

In order to use variables in your Behat feature, you must do 2 things:

• Add the Feature Context class: rdx\behatvars\BehatVariablesContext
• Add the Extension class: rdx\behatvars\BehatVariablesExtension

See the Behat docs for where they fit in behat.yml, or see this repo's behat.yml:

default:
  suites:
    default:
      contexts:
        - rdx\behatvars\BehatVariablesContext
        - FeatureContext
  extensions:
      rdx\behatvars\BehatVariablesExtension: ~

And make sure your custom steps have a scalar return value, or an array of scalars:

/**
 * @Given a value :value
 */
public function aValue($value) {
  return $value;
}

/**
 * @Given values :value1 and :value2
 */
public function valuesAnd($value1, $value2) {
  return [$value1, $value2];
}

Examples

See features/simple.feature for very simple examples (with only 3 custom steps). It's the test used to test this package.

Features

This package provides 1 step, in several formats:

(I|we) save (it|that|those|them) into "VARIABLE_NAME"

So you can make several custom step combinations:

Given "4" cars in the same shop                   # Custom
And we save those into "CAR1,CAR2,CAR3,CAR4"      # Provided

Given a user "Fred" in organization "McDonald's"  # Custom
And we save those into "USER,ORGANIZATION"        # Provided