Home

Awesome

Cucumber Messages

Cucumber Messages is a message protocol for representing results and other information from Cucumber. The protocol aims to decouple various components of the Cucumber platform, with the following advantages:

Message Overview

messages.png

Note: Markdown and Excel formats are currently not supported and mentioned here as potential future alternative languages to express BDD scenarios.

JSON Schema

The jsonschema directory contains JSON Schema definitions for each message type.

See messages.md for a detailed description of each message type.

Encoding

When Cucumber Messages are stored in a file or sent over a network, they are encoded as NDJSON. We call this a message stream.

Each message in a message stream is of type Envelope.

Language implementations

Each subdirectory defines language-specific implementations of these messages, generated from the JSON schemas. The current implementations are:

There is also 1 subdirectory for Elixir which contains the legacy implementation which was largely driven by protobuf. This is currently not implemented or tested / integrated into our CI and will require the process of porting over to the JSON schema protocol.

Message emitters

Cucumber Messages are currently sent by the following versions of Cucumber (using the message formatter):

Messages emitters for the other Cucumber languages (e.g. Perl) are not yet implemented.

Why Cucumber Messages

Cucumber needs to produce results in a machine-readable format so that other tools can generate reports.

messages-stream.svg

Historically, Cucumber did this with the json and junit formatters. These formats however, have several shortcomings that are now addressed by using Cucumber Messages.

The json formatter is now in maintenance mode for these implementations, and Messages is the preferred standard. See utilities for a list of tools that may help with backward and forward compatibility with the json format.

High memory footprint

JSON and XML production/consumption is done by serialising/deserialising an object graph. For "big" Cucumber runs this graph may consume a considerable amount of RAM, in particular if several large attachments (screenshots) are attached.

This can cause out of memory errors, aborting Cucumber runs or reporting jobs. It also means that no results can be consumed by downstream processors until the last scenario has finished.

With Cucumber Messages, several messages containing smaller pieces of information are emitted continuously to a stream (NDJSON, see above), avoiding high memory consumption and enabling real-time processing of results.

Lack of a schema

The JSON reporter does not have a formal schema. This has led to slightly inconsistent implementations of the JSON formatter in various Cucumber implementations. Consumers of the JSON format have to anticipate and detect these inconsistencies and try to cope with them.

Limited information

The junit XML format can only contain very limited information such as test case name and status. While there isn't an official schema for JUnit XML, there are a few defacto ones around which are very limited.

The json format represents the following information:

However, it does not contain the following information (but Cucumber Messages does):

This kind of information is required to produce rich reports and analytics, and is used in @cucumber/react-components and Cucumber Reports.

Examples

You will find examples of Cucumber Messages in the compatibility-kit project.

Utilities