Pickle

Lib	Plugin	Processor

Pickle is an implementation of Cucumber for Android which generates the tests classes at compile time instead of runtime.

The main advantage over cucumber-android is that you won't need to use a different instrumentation runner for your Cucumber tests, and that, being generated, you can debug and inspect the tests, which makes it easier to debug errors.

Installation

Add this to your app build.gradle dependencies.

ext.pickleVersion = '1.3.2'
ext.cucumberVersion = '4.4.0' // Last supported version. Do not use never versions since annotation packages were moved.

buildscript {
  repositories {
    jcenter()
  }

  dependencies {
    classpath "com.fourlastor:pickle-plugin:$pickleVersion"
  }
}

dependencies { 
  androidTestImplementation "io.cucumber:cucumber-java:$cucumberVersion"
  androidTestImplementation "com.fourlastor:pickle-lib:$pickleVersion"
  androidTestAnnotationProcessor "com.fourlastor:pickle-processor:$pickleVersion"
  
  // For Kotlin projects with `kapt`
  // kaptAndroidTest "com.fourlastor:pickle-processor:$pickleVersion"

}

If you enable pickle on unit tests (see configuration below), remember to apply the annotation processor on your test variant!

Configuration

Add the following to your app build.gradle

Make sure to apply this plugin before the kotlin plugin, if using one.

apply plugin: 'com.fourlastor.pickle'

pickle {
    packageName = 'com.example.test' // package where tests will be generated
    strictMode = true // activate/deactivate strict mode (defaults to true)
    androidTest {
      enabled = true // enables pickle on androidTest (defaults to true)
      featuresDir = 'features' // location of features inside `androidTest/src/assets`
    }
    unitTest {
      enabled = false // enables pickle on unit tests (defaults to false)
      featuresDir = project.file('src/test/features') // absolute path to location of feature files for unit tests
    }
}

Test will be generated and you can run them as you would run normal Android/unit tests 🎉

Disabling strict mode will generate tests only for scenario having all the steps/background steps defined, and empty tests annotated with @Ignore for scenario with missing steps. The default behavior (strict) will fail at compile time if some scenarios are missing any step.

Modules

There are 3 modules: library, plugin, and annotation processor.

Library

The library contains only an annotation class (Pickle) which is required for the other 2 modules to work. This class holds the settings passed to the plugin.

Plugin

The plugin is responsible for triggering a new build in case the assets change, and to provide the extension to configure Pickle. It registers a code generation task that will create a new class representing the current state of the assets (contains a hashcode of the files).

Annotation Processor

The annotation processor will look for the hash class generated by the plugin (PickleHash, annotated with Pickle), read the settings from the annotation and generate test classes representing the feature files.

Sample

To open the samples, open a new project in Intellij IDEA and select the sample folder, which contains 2 project: app-kotlin and app-java.

It uses composite builds to load the project's libraries, so you can freely modify them and it will pick them up.

Known Issues

• Cucumber Expressions are not supported yet. Issue #52.
  • IntelliJ IDEA Plugin recently started to use Cucumber Expressions by default for parameters. Convert them to Regex for Pickle to understand.
• The package of Given/When/Then annotations were moved with recent Cucumber versions. New locations are not supported yet. Issue #48.