Use of BeforeAll/AfterAll in Kotlin-based Cucumber suite does not work as expected

[ejbartelds]

👓 What did you see?

@BeforeAll in a Kotlin-based Cucumber suite did not work as expected, even though placed in a companion object and annotated @JvmStatic

✅ What did you expect to see?

I expected the @JvmStatic and @BeforeAll annotated method to be picked up by Cucumber without problems, as a before-all initializer method.

📦 Which tool/library version are you using?

cucumber-java 7.20.1 kotlin 2.0.x

🔬 How could we reproduce it?

See screenhots: in Kotlin, write a suite or a test and have a beforeAll method. See the error appear.
Debug this and set a breakpoint in io.cucumber.java.MethodScanner::scan ; you'll see the beforeAll method is "seen" twice, once as a static final method (whish is OK) and once as a non-final method (in the companion object), which triggers the error.

📚 Any additional context?

No response

[mpkorstanje]

As a work around could you check if it works when you declare the functions at package level instead?

[ejbartelds]

Ah, why didn't I think of that... A package method does indeed work, and is a viable workaround (for me at least). Thank you for the suggestion.

[mpkorstanje]

Looks like it is also still impossible to accurately detect companion objects in Java without depending on kotlin-reflect.

So probably worth adding a note to the documentation of cucumber-java about this.

[CraftyFella]

I found this also works

object AnObject {
    
    @BeforeAll
    @JvmStatic
    fun beforeAll() {
        // code here
    }

    @AfterAll
    @JvmStatic
    fun afterAll() {
        // code here
    }
}

You can also have a class inside an object such as this:

object AnObject {
    
    @BeforeAll
    @JvmStatic
    fun beforeAll() {
        // code here
    }

    @AfterAll
    @JvmStatic
    fun afterAll() {
        // code here
    }
    class AClass {
        @Before
        fun beforeEachScenario(scenario: Scenario) {
            // code here
        }
    }
}

Which does allow you have reference private vals and vars inside the parent object.

[CraftyFella]

It would be great to be able to mix @BeforeAll and @before in the same kotlin class using the companion object, however as the original poster @ejbartelds pointed out, this results in an exception.

Suppressed: io.cucumber.java.InvalidMethodSignatureException: A method annotated with BeforeAll or AfterAll must have one of these signatures:
 * public static void before_or_after_all()
at void com.example.Hooks$Companion.beforeAll()

class Hooks {

    @Before
    fun beforeEachScenario(scenario: Scenario) {
        // Use private val in before hook
        assert(setInBeforeAll == 1)
    }

    companion object {
        
        private var setInBeforeAll: Int = 0

        @BeforeAll
        @JvmStatic
        fun beforeAll() {
            setInBeforeAll = 1
        }
        
        @AfterAll
        @JvmStatic
        fun afterAll() {
            // code here
        }
    }
}

This would allow you to have private values in the companion object that can be used in the @before steps.

[mpkorstanje]

@CraftyFella unfortunately it is not possible to access a companion object without kotlin-reflect. So unless someone makes a dedicated Kotlin backed that will not be possible.