What results can I force in a cucumber scenario

Question

Using ruby / cucumber, I know you can explicitly call a fail("message"), but what are your other options?

The reason I ask is that we have 0... I repeat, absolutly NO control over our test data. We have cucumber tests that test edge cases that we may or may not have users for in our database. We (for obvious reasons) do not want to throw away the tests, because they are valuable; however since our data set cannot test that edge case, it fails because the sql statement returns an empty data set. Right now, we just have those tests failing, however I would like to see something along the lines of "no_data" or something like that if the sql statement returns an empty data set. So the output would look like

Scenarios:  100 total (80 passed, 5 no_data, 15 fail)

I am willing to use the already implemented "skipped" if there is a skip("message") function.

What are my options so we can see that with the current data, we just don't have any test data for those tests? making these manual tests is also not an option. They need to be run ever week with our automation, but somehow separate from the failures. Failure means defect, no_data found means it's not a testable condition. It's the difference between a warning: we have not tested this edge case, and Alert: broken code.

Answer 1

You can't invoke 'skipped', but you can certainly call pending with or without an error message. I've used this in a similar situation to yours. Unless you're running in strict mode then having pending scenarios won't cause any failures. The problem I encountered was that occasionally a step would get mis-spelled causing cucumber to mark that as pending, since it was not matching a step definition. That then became lost in the sea of 'legitimate' pending scenarios and was weeks before we discovered it.