How to use an external dataTable in Cucumber?

Question

I'm using Cucumber and Java to write BDD tests.

I wanted to migrate from usung datatables in feature files, because I have a lot of fields and it's dublicated for a few steps, to using link to the table with values. From this one approach:

GIVEN I created account with
| name | type  |
| test | basic |

to the approach:

GIVEN I created account with account.table

account.table file has value:

| name | type  |
| test | basic |

I don't know how to parse 'path to the file with dataTable' to the actual 'dataTable'. I tried write step like this:

@GIVEN("^I created account with \"([^\"]*)\"$")
    public void createAccount(DataTable dataTable) { ... }

But it's not working. Because there are no automatic convertion from path to file to dataTable. Here's the error:

cucumber.runtime.CucumberException: Don't know how to convert "resources\testdata\account.table" into cucumber.api.DataTable. Try writing your own converter: @cucumber.deps.com.thoughtworks.xstream.annotations.XStreamConverter(DataTableConverter.class)

Is there any examples of parsing it or any ideas?

Answer 1

Did it with following code, but wanted something easy and out of Cucumber box itself:

public void readFromExternalTable(String fileName) throws IOException {
        List<String> lines = readLinesFromFile(fileName);
        List<String> headers = getColumnsFromRow(lines.get(0));
        List<String> values = getColumnsFromRow(lines.get(1));
        DataTable table = createTable(headers, values);
    }

static List<String> readLinesFromFile(String fileName) {
    List<String> lines = new ArrayList<>();
    BufferedReader reader;
    try {
        reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));
        String line;
        while ((line =  reader.readLine()) != null) {
            lines.add(line);
        }
        reader.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return lines;
}

static List<String> getColumnsFromRow(String line) {
    List<String> list = new ArrayList<>();
    String[] row  = line.split("\\|");
    for (int i = 1; i < row.length; i++) {
        list.add(row[i].trim());
    }
    return list;
}

static <String> DataTable createTable(List<String> headers, List<String> values) {
    List<List<String>> rawTable = new ArrayList<>();
    rawTable.add(headers);
    rawTable.add(values);
    return DataTable.create(rawTable);
}