Outdated Recipes

‹prev | My Chain | next›

Having deployed another feature to the beta site, it is time to take stock again of where I am at:

cstrom@jaynestown:~/repos/eee-code$ cucumber features -i
...
37 scenarios (5 undefined, 32 passed)
333 steps (13 skipped, 22 undefined, 298 passed)
0m37.909s

Not too shabby.

The 5 undefined Cucumber scenarios are contained in two features:

Feature: Alternate preparations for recipes

  As a user curious about a recipe
  I want to see a list of similar recipes
  So that I can find a recipe that matches my tastes or ingredients on hand

Feature: Updating recipes in our cookbook

  As an author
  I want to mark recipes as replacing old one
  So that I can record improvements and retain previous attempts for reference

If I were starting from scratch, I would choose to implement the "Alternate" recipes feature first. Presenting a list of alternate preparations is a nice means of engaging users and encouraging them to explore the site.

I am replacing a legacy site however, so I am more interested in suppressing recipes that have been updated. Some of the early recipes in our cookbook were... rough. I would truly hate to replace the legacy site without including a warning on such recipes that a better recipe now exists.

The "Updating recipes in our cookbook" feature has three scenarios:

Scenario: No previous or next version of a recipe
Scenario: A previous version of the recipe
Scenario: Searching for a recipe with an update

The first scenario should work now, but some of the steps in there can be re-used in subsequent steps—making it worthwhile to implement:

  Scenario: No previous or next version of a recipe

    Given a "Buttermilk Pancake" recipe with "buttermilk" in it
    When I view the recipe
    Then I should not see previous versions of the recipe
    And I should not see updated versions of the recipe

I can define the first, given-a-pancake step, as:

Given /^a "([^\"]*)" recipe with "([^\"]*)" in it$/ do |title, ingredient|
  @date = Date.new(2009, 9, 5)
  @title = title
  @permalink = @date.to_s + "-" + @title.downcase.gsub(/\W/, '-')

  recipe = {
    :title => @title,
    :date  => @date,
    :preparations => [{'ingredient' => {'name' => ingredient}}]
  }

  RestClient.put "#{@@db}/#{@permalink}",
    recipe.to_json,
    :content_type => 'application/json'
end

There is nothing new in there—it is very similar to the step defined in earlier scenarios describing details of the various recipe pages. In this case it is modified to expect an ingredient in the text so that the recipe pages can be tested for it. The when-i-visit-the-page step was already defined, so I need only to define the last two steps in the scenario.

In the legacy site, recipes that update previous entries in the cookbook contain a note similar to:



For the next step, I am checking that the current recipe is not an update, so I do not want to see any text to the effect:

Then /^I should not see previous versions of the recipe$/ do
  response.should_not contain 'This is an update of a previous recipe'
end

Similarly, when a recipe has been updated on the legacy site, it contains text like this:



The last step in this "happy path" scenario of no update, then, should be:

Then /^I should not see updated versions of the recipe$/ do
  response.should_not contain 'This recipe has been updated'
end

And, without doing a lick of "real" work, I have my scenario working:

cstrom@jaynestown:~/repos/eee-code$ cucumber features/recipe_replacement.feature:7
Sinatra::Test is deprecated; use Rack::Test instead.
Feature: Updating recipes in our cookbook

  As an author
  I want to mark recipes as replacing old one
  So that I can record improvements and retain previous attempts for reference

  Scenario: No previous or next version of a recipe             # features/recipe_replacement.feature:7
    Given a "Buttermilk Pancake" recipe with "buttermilk" in it # features/step_definitions/recipe_replacement.rb:1
    When I view the recipe                                      # features/step_definitions/recipe_details.rb:155
    Then I should not see previous versions of the recipe       # features/step_definitions/recipe_replacement.rb:17
    And I should not see updated versions of the recipe         # features/step_definitions/recipe_replacement.rb:21

1 scenario (1 passed)
4 steps (4 passed)
0m0.636s

Besides getting a simple scenario passing, I not have have lotsa blue (defined, but not yet reached steps) in the other two scenarios in this feature:



Most importantly, I have begun noodling through this feature. Tomorrow, actual work begins.