NullpointerException when using multiple @Before in Cucumber-jvm

Question

I am using cucumber-jvm.

I have an init method to initialize all the necessary stuff, such as the browser dimensions, application url etc. I have put this init method under a @Before (cucumber.api) tag.

    @Before
public void initLoginPage() throws Exception {
    getBrowserDimension();
    setBrowserCapabilities();
    init(getApplicationUrl());
}

My life was fine with this running smoothly. Now, I also wanted to use @Before for some tags at scenario levels. Say my scenario looks like:

@myTag
When I do blah
Then I should get blah-blah

And I wanted to use something like:

@Before(@myTag)
public void beforeScenario(){
  blah = true;
}

But the moment I give it another @Before, it starts giving a NullPointerException. I tracked it back to the runBeforeHooks and runHookIfTagsMatch methods in Cucumber's Runtime class. They are throwing the exception for the @Before (for initLoginPage()) itself. Is there a conflict getting created with multiple @Before's? How can I resolve this?

Answer 1

I found the solution to get this working. The problem was that any of the @Before codes were getting picked up in a random order. It wasn't based on the assumption that a @Before without parameters will be executed before @Before("myTag").

So the trick is to assign order parameter (in @Before) some value. The default order that gets assigned to @Before is 10000. So, if we define the order value explicitly, it should work.

So basically, my code for initializer could look like:

@Before(order=1)
public void initLoginPage() throws Exception {
  getBrowserDimension();
  setBrowserCapabilities();
  init(getApplicationUrl());
}

That solved my problem