No signature of method for running cucumber test when using cucumber v1.2.4

Question

I'm having a problem with setting up the developing environment of my own. I'm using eclipse phontom with eclipse-groovy and Cucumber Eclipse plugin, and want to join the development that write test codes using groovy and cucumber.

At first I import dependency for cucumber (io.cucumber.cucumber-groovy:4.5.3) through maven , and everything works fine. However, some days later, colleagues had told me that they used to import dependency with older version (info.cukes.cucumber-groovy:1.2.4). And everything is broken in my laptop after downgrade.

For example, following is a simple step definition of Given.

package steps

import cucumber.api.groovy.EN
import cucumber.api.groovy.Hooks

this.metaClass.mixin(EN)
this.metaClass.mixin(Hooks)

Given(/an item ID which does not exist/) { ->
    documentId = "test_not_exist_" + UUID.randomUUID().toString()
}

And when I run it on my laptop, the following exception is raised.

No signature of method: steps.RawItemRetrieval.Given() is applicable for argument types: (java.lang.String, steps.RawItemRetrieval$_run_closure1) values: [an item ID which does not exist, steps.RawItemRetrieval$_run_closure1@45d2ade3]
Possible solutions: grep(), run(), run(), find(), every()
    at cucumber.runtime.groovy.GroovyBackend.loadGlue(GroovyBackend.java:85)
    at cucumber.runtime.Runtime.<init>(Runtime.java:91)
    at cucumber.runtime.Runtime.<init>(Runtime.java:69)
    at cucumber.runtime.Runtime.<init>(Runtime.java:65)
    at cucumber.api.cli.Main.run(Main.java:35)
    at cucumber.api.cli.Main.main(Main.java:18)

Is there anything I should do to make things work under dependency info.cukes.cucumber-groovy:1.2.4?

Following are my development environment which may be relevant:

JDK: Amazon Corretto-8.212.04.2 (build 1.8.0_212-b04)
Maven: 3.3.9
Groovy compiler in eclipse: 2.4.17

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

OK, I think I have found the reason. Maybe it is caused by cucumber 1.2.4 does not support step definition in the following format:

Given(/an item ID which does not exist/) { ->
    ....
}

When I change the style to regex format, it works again.

Given(~/^an item ID which does not exist$/) { ->
    ....
}

Thanks Mark Rotteveel for the suggestion!