Is it possible to skip a scenario with Cucumber-JVM at run-time

Question

I want to add a tag @skiponchrome to a scenario, this should skip the scenario when running a Selenium test with the Chrome browser. The reason to-do this is because some sc

Answer 1

It's actually really easy. If you dig though the Cucumber-JVM and JUnit 4 source code, you'll find that JUnit makes skipping during runtime very easy (just undocumented).

Take a look at the following source code for JUnit 4's ParentRunner, which Cucumber-JVM's FeatureRunner (which is used in Cucumber, the default Cucumber runner):

@Override
public void run(final RunNotifier notifier) {
    EachTestNotifier testNotifier = new EachTestNotifier(notifier,
            getDescription());
    try {
        Statement statement = classBlock(notifier);
        statement.evaluate();
    } catch (AssumptionViolatedException e) {
        testNotifier.fireTestIgnored();
    } catch (StoppedByUserException e) {
        throw e;
    } catch (Throwable e) {
        testNotifier.addFailure(e);
    }
}

This is how JUnit decides what result to show. If it's successful it will show a pass, but it's possible to @Ignore in JUnit, so what happens in that case? Well, an AssumptionViolatedException is thrown by the RunNotifier (or Cucumber FeatureRunner in this case).

So your example becomes:

@Before("@skiponchrome") // this works
public void beforeScenario() {
  if(currentBrowser == 'chrome') { // this works
    throw new AssumptionViolatedException("Not supported on Chrome")
  }
}

If you've used vanilla JUnit 4 before, you'd remember that @Ignore takes an optional message that is displayed when a test is ignored by the runner. AssumptionViolatedException carries the message, so you should see it in your test output after a test is skipped this way without having to write your own custom runner.