Sharing state between step definitions in Cucumber

Question

I have 4 step definition classes and a set of domain object classes. My first step definition class looks like this:

public class ClaimProcessSteps {
    Claim claim;

    public ClaimProcessSteps(Claim w){
        this.claim = w;
    }

    @Given("^a claim submitted with different enrolled phone's model$")
    public void aClaimSubmittedFromCLIENTSChannelWithDifferentEnrolledPhoneSModel() throws Throwable {
        claim = ObjMotherClaim.aClaimWithAssetIVH();
    }


}

My Claim class looks like this:

public class Claim {
    private String claimType;
    private String clientName;                  
    private Customer caller;
    private List<Hold> holds;

    public Claim() {}

    public Claim(String claimType, String clientName, Customer caller) {
        this.claimType              =       claimType;
        this.clientName             =       clientName;
        this.caller                 =       caller;
    }

    public String getClaimType() {
        return claimType;
    }

My second step definition class looks like:

public class CaseLookupSteps {
    Claim claim;

    public CaseLookupSteps(Claim w){
        this.claim = w;
    }

    @When("^I access case via (right|left) search$")
    public void iAccessCaseInCompassViaRightSearch(String searchVia) throws Throwable {
       System.out.println(claim.getClaimType());
    }

I've already imported the picocontainter dependency in my POM.XML and I am getting the following error.

3 satisfiable constructors is too many for 'class java.lang.String'. Constructor List:[(Buffer), (Builder), ()]

None of my step definition classes constructors receive primitives as arguments. Does anyone have any clue as to why I am still getting that error? Could it be my business object constructor that does expect a String in its constructor?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Have you tried removing the non-default constructor in Claim? That's taking a String as parameter, so that may be the issue. — alayor, Nov 09 '17 at 19:30

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 09 '17 at 19:32

Picocontainer looks over not only your step definition classes to resolve dependencies. It also looks over all classes that your steps definitions depend on.

In this case, it's trying to resolve the dependencies for your non-default Claim constructor.

 public Claim(String claimType, String clientName, Customer caller) {
    ...
 }

According to this issue there's no way to solve this other than keeping only default constructors in all your dependencies.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 09 '17 at 22:05

Assuming your scenario looks like this:

Given some sort of claim
When I lookup this claim
Then I see  this claim

Currently your test is missing the setup step of the claim.

So rather then directly sharing the claim object between steps you should create a ClaimService class with only the default constructor. You can inject this service into your step definitions.

Once you have injected the service, you can use it in the step definition of Given some sort of claim to callclaimService.createSomeSortOfClaim() to create a claim. This claim can be created in memory, in a mock db, actual db, or other persistence medium.

In When I lookup this claim you then use claimService.getClaim() to return that claim so you can use its type to search for it.

Doing it this way you'll avoid the difficulty of trying to make the DI container figure out how it should create the claim under test.

Sharing state between step definitions in Cucumber

2 Answers2