How to order user clean-up in Gherkin+Cucumber+Cypress

I am writing testing for user-manipulation focused webUI application (freeipa).

I want to test addition of multiple users and then their deletions. For that, I need to make sure that users from previous runs are cleaned, especially since in local development the back-end application keeps running without restart (in Github-CI it spawns for each PR run).

Relevant snippet:

 Background:
    Given I am logged in as "admin"
    Given I am on "active-users" page

  Scenario Outline: Add a new user
    When I click on "Add" button
    * I type in the field "User login" text "<userLogin>"
    * I type in the field "First name" text "<firstName>"
    * I type in the field "Last name" text "<lastName>"
    * I type in the field "New Password" text "<password>"
    * I type in the field "Verify password" text "<password>"
    * in the modal dialog I click on "Add" button
    Then I should see "<userLogin>" entry in the data table
    Examples:
      | userLogin | firstName | lastName | password             |
      | testuser1 | Arthur    | Dent     | ILoveKlingonPoetry42 |
      | testuser2 | Banana    | Bread    | FishAndChips097      |
      | testuser3 | Cypress   | Gateway  | TestingIsFun73       |


  Scenario: Delete a user
    Given I should see "testuser1" entry in the data table
    When I select entry "testuser1" in the data table
    And I click on "Delete" button
    Then I see "Remove active users" modal

    When in the modal dialog I check "Delete" radio selector
    And in the modal dialog I click on "Delete" button
    Then I should not see "testuser1" entry in the data table

What I tried:

Before hook
- This is executed before Background (before admin is logged in), therefore it fails
putting "clean state" step in the Background block
- this gets executed before every scenario, therefore Delete a user fails
putting "clean state" step as a first step in Add a new user scenario:
- This beats the purpose of having multiple users visible.

How should I refactor/order my tests in order to start Add a new user with an empty table, but keep the added users for deletion? If this violates coupling principle, is it possible viable to re-use scenario in another scenario? Thank you!

Solution

Since you have three example users, can you only run run "clean state" when the the user count equals 3? Or only when testuser2 and testuser3 are present, since Scenario: Delete a user will take care of #1.

Place the step last in Background.

There is also conditional Before() with tags, but I don't think it directly slots into your test suite above (since Scenario Outline: Add a new user runs three times).

Before({ tags: "@clean" }, function () {
  loginAdmin()
  cleanState()
})

The other thing to consider is Cypress/Mocha before() as opposed to cucumber Before() which is equivalent to beforeEach().

In cypress/support/e2e.ts

before(() => {
  loginAdmin()
  cleanState()
})