How is data from one Behave step passed to a later step?

Question

Consider a Behave scenario:

When some magic number is generated
Then the number should be greater than 5

So I have a @when function that produces (say) a random number and I need that number to be present in the @then conditional test.

How do I pass the result of one step to another?

Answer 1

You can set data on the context object passed in to the steps. From the documentation:

@given('I request a new widget for an account via SOAP')
def step_impl(context):
    client = Client("http://127.0.0.1:8000/soap/")
    context.response = client.Allocate(customer_first='Firstname',
        customer_last='Lastname', colour='red')

@then('I should receive an OK SOAP response')
def step_impl(context):
    eq_(context.response['ok'], 1)

You can also modify the context at various other points in the test run, before and after every step, feature, scenario, tag, etc.