Using Factory Girl step definitions in Cucumber features (Rails 3)

Question

I'm trying to use Cucumber and Factory Girl. The following lines:

  Given I am not logged in
  And   the following user exists:
    | login  | email               | password   | confirmation |
    | user50 | [email protected] | secret50   | secret 50    | 
 ....

raises the following error:

Undefined step: "the following user exists:" (Cucumber::Undefined exception)
/home/user/RubymineProjects/project/features/sign_in.feature:9:in `And the following user exists:

You can implement step definitions for undefined steps with these snippets:
And /^the following user exists:$/ do |table|
  # table is a Cucumber::Ast::Table
  pending # express the regexp above with the code you wish you had
end

'

I've installed factory_girl_rails (even RubyMine's code completion feature works with Factory Girl step ... )

#Gemfile
group :test do
   gem "cucumber-rails", ">= 0.3.2"
   gem "factory_girl_rails"
 end

#features/support/env.rb
require 'factory_girl'
require 'factory_girl/step_definitions'

Any ideas? Thanks

---

Update: Thanks to @sj26 and @twmills I realized that I forgot to create a :user factory with Factory Girl. Once I created it, everything worked well.

Answer 1

For those people, who trying to use FactoryGirl helpers now:

From FactoryGirl 3.5.0 these step helpers are deprecated and removed in 4.0.0: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/25650434584/writing-better-cucumber-scenarios-or-why-were

As of FactoryGirl 3.5.0, using any of FactoryGirl’s generated step definitions will print out a deprecation warning. We’ll be removing the step definitions completely in the 4.0.0 release of FactoryGirl in accordance with SemVer. I imagine the existing code will be extracted to a gem similar to Cucumber Rails’ training wheels with a nice warning urging developers not to use the the steps.

So if you want to use FactoryGirl in Cucumber you should use it in your own step definitions.

Answer 2

You need to include your factories first. factory_girl/step_definitions will iterate over your defined factories to define a step for each.

I use this in features/support/factory_girl.rb:

# Require factories...
require 'spec/factories'

# Then define steps based on factories.
require 'factory_girl/step_definitions'