In order to speed up prototyping and development of a story suite, the structure of your YAML data specified in preconditions, parameters and step arguments need not be specified in advance.

All data that is parsed without a validator is parsed either as a dict, list or string, as per the StrictYAML spec.

When your story suite matures and the structure of your story files has solidified, you can specify validators that fail fast when YAML snippets with an invalid structure are used.

example.story:

Create files:
  given:
    files created:
      preconditionfile.txt:
        some text
  steps:
    - Create file:
        details:
          file name: step1.txt
          content: some other text

engine.py:

from hitchstory import BaseEngine, GivenDefinition, GivenProperty


class Engine(BaseEngine):
    given_definition = GivenDefinition(
        files_created=GivenProperty(),
    )

    def set_up(self):
        for filename, contents in self.given['files_created'].items():
            with open(filename, 'w') as handle:
                handle.write(contents)

    def create_file(self, details):
        with open(details['file name'], 'w') as handle:
            handle.write(details['content'])

With code:

from hitchstory import StoryCollection
from pathlib import Path
from engine import Engine

StoryCollection(Path(".").glob("*.story"), Engine()).named("Create files").play()

Will output:

RUNNING Create files in /path/to/working/example.story ... SUCCESS in 0.1 seconds.

File preconditionfile.txt should now contain:

some text

File step1.txt should now contain:

some other text

Executable specification

Documentation automatically generated from gradual-typing.story storytests.