Weblogism

Cucumber-jvm 1.1.3 issue with JSON formatter

I have been struggling with a weird cucumber issue today, as it took me some time to figure out what was going on, I thought I’d share this in case somebody is going down the same path.

It started when I decided to upgrade my cucumber-jvm example to the latest version (1.1.3). Quickly after upgrading, I hit that error:

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: -1
    at java.util.ArrayList.get(ArrayList.java:324)
    at gherkin.formatter.JSONFormatter.getFeatureElement(JSONFormatter.java:199)
    at gherkin.formatter.JSONFormatter.addHook(JSONFormatter.java:156)
    at gherkin.formatter.JSONFormatter.before(JSONFormatter.java:147)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)

This is known issue, that has already been fixed in gherkin.

So I rebuilt gherkin locally, thinking it would solve all my problems, and I was still the exact same error, at the same line number. After changing version, deleting the jar from the Maven repository, I was still getting the same error, so it was clear that the class was being pulled from somewhere else.

It turns out the jar was being pulled from cucumber-picocontainer, which uses shade to create an über-jar with its dependencies, including gherkin. How did I figure that out? Using this piece of code:

        URL location = JSONFormatter.class.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation();
        System.err.println(location.getPath());

The solution to the problem is therefore to rebuild gherkin, then cucumber-picocontainer, and you’re sorted.

Alternatively you can also just rebuild gherkin, and then make sure it is defined before cucumber-picocontainer:

        <dependency>
          <groupId>info.cukes</groupId>
          <artifactId>gherkin</artifactId>
          <version>2.11.8</version>
          <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>info.cukes</groupId>
          <artifactId>cucumber-picocontainer</artifactId>
          <version>1.1.3</version>
          <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>