data factory for cucumber, watir

Question

We have a isolated test automation team responsible for automating only watir+cucumber functional test cases. Their code base is not attached with the rails app that other developers are working on, but kept separate. We have automated several test cases so far, and now what problem we have is, some (watir/cucumber specs)test cases require some data to be preexist into db, so it(testcase) should focus only on the problem stmt, and not creating any data-require itself.

Example, say if it has to check whether rating is working for a post, it requires a post object should preexist and it just checks rating. And not creating 1st post object and then checking its rating.

What are the best approaches here? Like we have fixtures and factory-girl for rails unit testing, what is there for cucumber specs? Or Shall we make use of features only here? These testers may not have idea of all models that exist, do they be aware of them so to make use of fixtures by calling Rails-Model interface.

My idea was, when we write feature file, it should not point or talk about any Model which looks meta stuff. Watir/specs test cases should only be aware of "Web-application"/browser only as the interface to talk/deal with the application. They should not know any other interface(fixture/Models). Hence they should create their own data on their own, by making use of the single interface they know.

Again, what I want to know that, is there any ruby lib/code, given table names, column names, and values(all most like fixtures yml), along with db parameters. It will simply insert them into db, without context of rails environment. And so testers those are having their environment isolated from rails web developers would able to work on their own. Rails fixtures, or factory girls seem to be well coupled with rails. Or am I incorrect?

Answer 1

Like Chirantan said you could use Factory girl with cucumber. As require your factories in test unit or RSpec, you can do the same in the cucumber's env.rb file or any custom config file.

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/284805810/gimme-three-steps

http://www.claytonlz.com/2010/03/zero-to-tested-with-cucumber-and-factory-girl/

http://www.andhapp.com/blog/2009/11/07/using-factory_girl-with-cucumber/