Behave - Common features between applications, avoiding duplication - bdd

Question

I have many applications which I want to test, which have a largely overlapping set of features. Here is an oversimplified example of a scenario I might have:
Given <name> is playing a game,
When they shoot at a <color> target
Then they should <event>
Examples:
| name | color | event |
| Alice | red | hit |
| Alice | blue | miss |
| Bob | red | miss |
| Bob | blue | hit |
| Bob | green | hit |
It's a silly example, but suppose really I have a lot of players with different hit/miss conditions, and I want to run just the scenarios for a given name? Say, I only want to run the tests for Alice. There's still advantage to having all the hit/miss tests in a single Scenario Outline (since, after all, they're all closely related).
One approach would be to just duplicate the test for every name and tag them, so something like:
#Alice
Given Alice is playing a game
When she shoots at a <color> target
Then she should <event>
Examples:
| color | event |
| red | hit |
| blue | miss |
This way I can run behave --tags #Alice, But then I'm repeated the same scenario for every user, and that's a lot of duplication. Is there a good way to still compress all the examples into one scenario - but only selectively run some of them? What's the right approach here?

Answer 1

Version 1.2.5 introduced better ways to distinguish scenario outlines. It is now possible to uniquely distinguish them and thus select a unique scenario generated from an outline with --name= at the command line. For instance, suppose the following feature file:
Feature: test
Scenario Outline: test
Given <name> is playing a game,
When they shoot at a <color> target
Then they should <event>
Examples:
| name | color | event |
| Alice | red | hit |
| Alice | blue | miss |
| Bob | red | miss |
| Bob | blue | hit |
| Bob | green | hit |
Let's say I want to run only the test for Bob, red, miss. It is in the first table, 3rd row. So:
behave --name="#1.3"
will select this test. In version 1.2.5 and subsequent versions. A generated scenario gets a name which includes "#<table number>.<row number>" where <table number> is the number of the table (starting from 1) and <row number> is the number of the row.
This won't easily allow you to select all scenarios that pertain to a single user. However, you can achieve it in another way. You can split your examples in two:
Examples: Alice
| name | color | event |
| Alice | red | hit |
| Alice | blue | miss |
Examples: Bob
| name | color | event |
| Bob | red | miss |
| Bob | blue | hit |
| Bob | green | hit |
The table names will appear in the generated scenario names and you could ask behave to run all the tests associated with one table:
behave --name="Alice"
I do not know of a way to access the example name in steps and thus get rid of the first column.
The full set of details is in the release notes for 1.2.5.