Automatching rails paths in cucumber

If you’re using cucumber as part of your testing, you probably have a paths.rb file that looks something like this:

module NavigationHelpers
  def path_to(page_name)
    case page_name

    when /the home page/
      root_path
    when /the new client page/
      new_client_path
    when /the clients page/
      clients_path
    # Add more page name => path mappings here
    else
      raise "Can't find mapping from \"#{page_name}\" to a path.\n" +
      "Now, go and add a mapping in features/support/paths.rb"
    end
  end
end

World(NavigationHelpers)

This let’s us use nice descriptive names in our scenarios, but it starts to become a pain when we add more and more paths. So how can we make it better?

By automatically matching some rails paths. Here’s the code:

module NavigationHelpers
  def path_to(page_name)
    case page_name

    when /the home page/
      root_path
    # Add more page name => path mappings here
    else
      if path = match_rails_path_for(page_name)
        path
      else
        raise "Can't find mapping from \"#{page_name}\" to a path.\n" +
        "Now, go and add a mapping in features/support/paths.rb"
      end
    end
  end

  def match_rails_path_for(page_name)
    if page_name.match(/the (.*) page/)
      return send "#{$1.gsub(" ", "_")}_path" rescue nil
    end
  end
end

World(NavigationHelpers)

What it does is pretty simple. Given a page name the clients page (with no other matches defined) it will try and send clients_path. If successful, then it returns the result, otherwise nil.

Not the biggest improvement in the world, but it’s made my cucumber tests just a little bit easier to write.