Can I use parameters with Twist concepts?

Question

The Twist documentation for extracting concepts shows how multiple steps can be grouped into one step that contains those steps. For instance, the following eight fixtures

 1. Start at the Maintain product catalog page.
 2. The page title should be “Joe’s musical —Maintain Product Catalog.”
 3. Click the Add New Instrument button.
 4. The page title should be “Joe’s musical—Add New Musical Instrument.”
 5. Enter text “Guitar” into the Instrument field.
 6. Select “Slide” from the Type selection list.
 7. Select “Dobro” from the Brand selection list.
 8. Click the Save button.

Can be condensed into one concept:

 1. Add a New Musical Instrument “Guitar” of type “Slide” and brand “Dobro”

However, the tutorial doesn't say if it's possible to use this concept with other parameters (perhaps with "Drum" instead of "Guitar"). However, it does clearly say that parameters in the concept name should be surrounded by quotes, but they also should match the parameter name, so it's not clear if it's possible.

So can I use parameters with Twist concepts?

Answer 1

Yes! The documentation is really crummy about making this clear, but it is absolutely possible.

If you extracted a concept in the way that they described in the tutorial you referenced and others, then the fixture Add a New Musical Instrument “Guitar” of type “Slide” and brand “Dobro” actually contains three parameters named Guitar, Slide, and Dobro. What makes this so confusing is in each scenario you can change the value of each parameter to whatever you like (perhaps "Drum", "Snare", "Yamaha"), but under the hood, the variables are still called by their original names (thus Guitar=Drum, etc.) and these original names will appear as default values whenever you add the concept to a scenario.

To eliminate confusion, I recommend changing these default names. In this case, it might be Add a New Musical Instrument “Instrument” of type “Type” and brand “Brand”. Bizarrely, you can't rename the parameters via "Rephrase the Open Concept" because you run into a catch-22 situation. You can't change the name of the concept because it doesn't match the usage in the fixture. And you can't rename the fixtures because the parameters are bound to the concept name. So I recommend just opening it up in the text editor and making the change there.

So bottom line, the examples make it seem like you can't use parameters because the parameters wind up being named after whatever value you inputted. I recommend changing the default parameter names, but you have to do it in the text editor because Twist won't let you.