Converting Datatable to object with null values

Question

Hi Everyone just wondering if I am following best practices here.

I have step defintions like the following

public class StepDefinitions {

    @DataTableType
    public Author authorEntry(Map<String, String> entry) {
        return new Author(
            entry.get("firstName"),
            entry.get("lastName"),
            entry.get("famousBook"));
    }

    @Given("There are my favorite authors")
    public void these_are_my_favourite_authors(List<Author> authors) {
        // step implementation
    }
}   

and my feature file could then be something like

        Feature: this is a feature
          Scenario: this is a scenario
            Given There are my favorite authors
            |firstName| lastName |
            | first   | last     |

         Scenario: this is another scenario
            Given There are my favorite authors
            |firstName| lastName | famousBook |
            | first   | last     | book       |
           

So in the first step it will create an Author object but with famousBook == null.

Since I am creating objects used for REST requests and jackson will ignore null values is it okay to create objects like this?

Answer 1

You are using wrong data structure for your examples. You can refer to this resource giving the examples of different table types.

In your case you have a table

|firstName| lastName |
| first   | last     |

and try to parse it into Map<String, String> entry which would result in the following map:

[key1 = firstName, value1 = lastName]
[key2 = first, value2 = last]

If you need to treat it like header in top line then you need to parse it into List<Map<String, String>>