World parameters available in BeforeAll / AfterAll hooks?

[jan-molak]

Hi team!

Now that Cucumber.js has BeforeAll and AfterAll hooks, would it make sense to expose world parameters to them?

import { BeforeAll, Before } from '@cucumber/cucumber';

BeforeAll(function() {
    console.log(this.parameters.baseUrl);   // throws an error, parameters undefined
});

Before(function() {
    console.log(this.parameters.baseUrl);   // works fine
});

Consider the following use case:

• Cucumber test suite interacts with a system that's deployed to multiple environments, each with its own URL
• I'd like the test suite to be configurable to point to any of those environments, ideally using a parameter when invoking Cucumber (i.e. cucumber-js --world-parameters='{"baseUrl":"prod.example.com"}'; this could be put into a profile, but the idea is the same)
• Let's also assume that the integration client I use to talk to those environments is expensive to create (say a DB connection), so I'd prefer to do the configuration step only once for all the scenarios, ideally in a BeforeAll hook.

What I'd love is to use the same this.parameters object that's available in all the other Cucumber steps in BeforeAll and AfterAll hooks. However, before proposing a PR I wanted to discuss the idea with you first @davidjgoss @charlierudolph @jbpros

Do you think we should have this functionality implemented in Cucumber.js? Does it make sense? Is there a better way to accomplish this goal?

[Tallyb]

I do something similar by using an env param DB_URL=XXXX cucumber-js ... and storing it on global.

[davidjgoss]

Hey @jan-molak, this seems to overlap quite a bit with #1393 - hope you're fine with me closing this so we can perhaps restart that discussion there?