What is a pickle ?

[cmarchand]

Hello,

I'm working on implement Cucumber for Xslt language, and actually I'm on generating messages described in compatibility-kit.

I can not understand what are pickles, for example https://github.com/cucumber/compatibility-kit/blob/c376061b4e2604af107d187aca05cacc4da2005a/devkit/samples/all-statuses/all-statuses.ndjson#L4 and following lines.

Is a pickle one test from a feature / scenario / scenario template ?

Thanks in advance,
Christophe

[mpkorstanje]

Oh that is kinda cool!

From https://github.com/cucumber/messages/blob/main/jsonschema/messages.md#pickle

A Pickle represents a template for a TestCase. It is typically derived from another format, such as GherkinDocument. In the future a Pickle may be derived from other formats such as Markdown or Excel files.

By making Pickle the main data structure Cucumber uses for execution, the implementation of Cucumber itself becomes simpler, as it doesn't have to deal with the complex structure of a GherkinDocument.

So when deriving a Pickle from a GherkinDocument:

• A Scenario becomes a single pickle.
• A Scenario Outline with 5 examples results in 5 pickles, one for each example.
• A feature level Background with three steps will result in every Pickle in the feature file starting with those three steps.
• A rule level Background with three steps will result in every Pickle in that rule starting with those three steps (after any feature level steps).

If you are implementing a Gherkin parser, you could also take a look at the test data we use for that: https://github.com/cucumber/gherkin/tree/main/testdata

[cmarchand]

Thanks a lot for these answers !

A background can also be located in a rule ? That's not clear in https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/reference#rule. I have to enforce my parser for this.

At runtime, backgrounds are "merged" into scenarios, and do not appear as standalone pickles, does it ?

Thanks for the link, I gonna dive in.

Thanks a lot,
Christophe

[mpkorstanje]

Backgrounds don't turn into pickles. The whole purpose of pickles is to hide backgrounds and the other complexities from the executor.

The interaction with backgrounds and rules is covered under the backgrounds section.

https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/reference/#background