Ambiguous step in Python Behave

Question

My business user likes to use the then sentence "It should be created", where it is determined by the context of the scenario. For example:

Given I have gift certificate for "<name>"
When I enter the gift certificate
Then It should be created

or

Given Customer order return for order "<order_no>"
When I create the customer order return
Then It should be created

In the "Then It should be created", I would like to retrieve either the created gift certificate or customer order return for comparison. However, they have completely different API and object.

Firstly, is there a way to do this in Python Behave without getting "Exception AmbiguousStep:"?

If not, what would be best practice in BDD world for this without forcing user to have to repeat themselves constantly by saying "Then The gift certificate should be created" or "Then The customer order return should be created"?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In the specific case you are giving us here, I would write the steps more verbosely to avoid the "it". So I would write "Then the gift certificate should be created", etc. I prefer to avoid having steps depend on state passed through context.

However...

There are times where it would be problematic to do this. In your case, maybe the politics of dealing with your business user make it so that asking for more verbosity would not fly well. Or there can be technical reasons that cause what I suggested above to be undesirable or flat out unworkable.

What you can do if you cannot use more verbose steps, is have the Then it should be created step be dependent on a context field being set to a value that will provide enough information to the step to perform its work. It could be something like context.created_object. The step that creates the object would set this field to an appropriate value so that Then it should be created can perform its work. What exactly you would store in there depends on the specifics of your application.

For one application of mine where I test the appearance of a contextual menu on the basis of mouse clicks in a browser window, sometimes what I record is a reference to the DOM element on which the user did the right-click that brought up the menu. Sometimes it is an object providing x, y coordinates. This is what my application needs in order to perform its checks. In this case it is preferable to have the information be passed through context because having Selenium query the DOM all over again in later steps can be very expensive over the network. Over dozens of tests, it can easily add minutes to a test suite's run, and then consider that the suite has to be run for multiple combinations of browser, OS, and browser version.