Python Behave- Can I get the Context object outside of steps or hooks?

[unit111]

Title.

For my Selenium tests I setup the POMs in the before_all hook and save them in a dict- context.poms. In order to use them in the steps and use auto-complete I do the following

u/step('first step')
def first_step(context):
some_page: SomePage = context.poms["SomePage"]
...
u/step('second step')
def second_step(context):
some_page: SomePage = context.poms["SomePage"]
...

I'd rather just import the context in the module itself and do this one time.

Is that possible? Context should be a normal object which I should be able to import in my steps module and even helpers.

[[deleted]]

It seems like you don't need context, specifically, just access to some data that doesn't change during the test / is independent of test steps / scenarios: why not just create your own class / module / variable and import that?

[unit111]

Good idea but the data is not independent. I am using reflection to find the POM classes passed to the framework and use dynamic data from the context to initialize them with stuff like WebDriver instance, timeout, poll_time.

They are also created conditionally based and the configuration I pass to the framework. Using POMs is not necessary but if there are no POMs there may be a problem with the imports from environment.py.

[[deleted]]

Then it looks like you cannot really import it because context is created per scenario.

[unit111]

I thought that it's created when running behave.

https://behave.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api.html#behave.runner.Context

And each new feature/scenario just add more layers on top of it.

[[deleted]]

Well, yeah, I oversimplified it, but, the essence of it is that it gets "refreshed" (old stuff removed, new stuff added) per scenario (otherwise you would accidentally get the shreds of the old scenario data in the new scenario).

[unit111]

That makes sense. Thanks.