REST API test cucumber steps best practice

Question

Trying to write up cucumber feature steps for REST API test.

I am not sure which approach is better:

Given I log in with username and password
When I add one "tv" into my cart
And I check my cart
Then I should see the item "tv" is in my cart

or

Given the client authenticate with username and password
When the client send POST to "/cart/add" with body "{item: body}"    
Then the response code should be "200"
And the response body should expect "{success: true}"
When the client send GET to "/cart"    
Then the response code should be "200"
And the response body should expect "{"items": ["tv"]}"

Is there any convention to follow when people trying to write cucumber steps for REST API?

Answer 1

I just stumbled on this helpful article: http://gregbee.ch/blog/effective-api-testing-with-cucumber

To summarize...

Scenario: List fruit
  Given the system knows about the following fruit:
    | name       | color  |
    | banana     | yellow |
    | strawberry | red    |
  When the client requests a list of fruit
  Then the response is a list containing 2 fruits
  And one fruit has the following attributes:
    | attribute | type   | value  |
    | name      | String | banana |
    | color     | String | yellow |
  And one fruit has the following attributes:
    | attribute | type   | value      |
    | name      | String | strawberry |
    | color     | String | red        |

Validating a result against JSON is tricky business because if the result is an array, the elements may not be the same order as how you are validating in the test.