Is there a lib for variable parsing? (feature request?)
Closed this issue · 6 comments
If we use gherkin with examples or just a simple sentence with variables, then we have to define parsers. Is there a lib, we could use to give these parsers instead of defining them manually all the time?
Is there a way to generate a step definition skeleton based on the conversations? It is repetitive too to copy-paste text from feature descriptions to step definitions. I think we are missing these tools.
If we use gherkin with examples or just a simple sentence with variables, then we have to define parsers. Is there a lib, we could use to give these parsers instead of defining them manually all the time?
Sorry I don't follow, can you provide a code example?
Is there a way to generate a step definition skeleton based on the conversations? It is repetitive too to copy-paste text from feature descriptions to step definitions. I think we are missing these tools.
This has been discussed before. @simoami created a project called mimik which can do step generation. I haven't investigated further as I think that a separate tool is the way to go.
What I am talking about is https://github.com/acuminous/yadda/blob/master/lib/Dictionary.js#L34
dictionary.define(term, pattern, converters)
- term - the simplest to give it manually
- pattern - reusable
- converter - reusable, depends on the pattern sometimes
For example:
https://github.com/acuminous/yadda/blob/master/examples/mocha-multi-library/lib/dictionary.js#L8
new Dictionary().define('NUM', /(\d+)/);
we could use
var ycv = require("yadda-common-variables");
new Dictionary().define('NUM', ycv.postitiveInteger, ycv.postitiveInteger.toNumber);
repeating a lot of regex patterns and converters is error prone.
It would be great if we could give the pattern and the converter in a single config object, so we could use
var ycv = require("yadda-common-variables");
new Dictionary().define('NUM', ycv.positiveInteger().toNumber());
or even
new Dictionary().define('NUM').positiveInteger().toNumber();
is possible.
By the latter one we could give multiple variables at once:
new Dictionary().define("a","b","c").positiveInteger().toNumber();
I am not sure whether this is possible currently, for example by giving an array of terms with the same pattern and converter.
Thanks for explaining the issue, however I don't think it's the right thing to add a predefined dictionary to Yadda. It's simple for project teams (or even companies) to create one and publish it to npm or a private repository if they're worried about duplication, and since Yadda supports multiple languages I would have to support many variations of the same term quite ignoring abbreviations and alternatives.
@cressie176 it would be better to put this into a separate library, but what prevents "acuminous" to do it? So it would be an official lib, which could be used by anyone, instead of something what I made in my free time. I'll write something now anyways, because I need it currently, but I am not sure the api and code quality will meet with the standards. To create more general libs usually you need a lot of time to think about the api... I know, I tried it many times and I failed many times. :-)))
Okay. I started a new repo here: https://github.com/inf3rno/yadda-variables let's see what I can do in the topic. I'll begin with xsd types and maybe later I add more.
but what prevents "acuminous" to do it?
Mainly that I don't have any interest in writing it. In the 2-3 years I've been using Yadda and the various incarnations before it was called that, I haven't used dictionaries for type conversion beyond numbers (which are not always positive), floats (should I use native floats or BigNumber?) and dates (should I use native dates or moment?).
In fact the original use case for dictionaries was to make steps easier to read. I was working on Visual Hospital and I needed to differentiate "a $gender patient", (where gender could be male or female) from "a $speciality patient", (where speciality may be one cardiovascular, respiratory, etc). This lead to some ugly regular expressions, which I hid behind dictionaries.
I added the ability to transform the values not because I wanted to parse types, but because I wanted to look up patients by name in later steps
Anyway have fun with yadda-variables.
@cressie176 Thanks! :-)