How to make stateful JBehave steps safe for multithreaded execution

Question

Currently, I'm injecting a steps class into a JUnit test using Spring:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration...
class MyTest extends JUnitStories {
    @Autowired private MySteps mySteps;

    public List<CandidateSteps> candidateSteps() {
        return new InstanceStepsFactory(configuration(), mySteps).createCandidateSteps();
    }

    ...
}

I'd like to run JBehave with multiple threads, so I can't inject a singleton MySteps bean any longer.

I've read http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JBEHAVE-492 but still can't see how to solve my problem.

Answer 1

This was asked a long time ago, but the answer is: Only hold state in ThreadLocal variables or even better wrap a ThreadLocal variable in one of your own classes. For example, take this code

The state class

public class State {
   private ThreadLocal<String> state;

   public void setState(String state) {
      this.state.set(state);
   }

   public String getState() {
      return this.state.get();
   }
}

And the steps

public class Steps {
   private State state;

   public Steps(State state) {
      this.state = state;
   }

   @Given("the following happens: $string")
   public void somethingHappens(String string) {
      state.setState(string);
   }

   @When("who knows")
   public void whoKnows() {
      String stat = state.getState();
   }

   @BeforeScenario
   public void cleanup() {
      state.setState(null);
   }
}

I suggest you to have something that before the scenario clears the variable, to prevent any kind of leak between different scenarios.