Support wildcards in optional sequences

[CLOVIS-AI]

🤔 What's the problem you're trying to solve?

We commonly have multiple variants of sentences with a few small differences. For example:

• Declare "this thing"
• Declare "this thing" as "that person"

✨ What's your proposed solution?

The ability to declare an expression "Declare {string}( as {string})". If the second value is not provided, a suitable language-specific default is provided to the parameter instead (e.g. null).

⛏ Have you considered any alternatives or workarounds?

• Declaring two sentences: leads to some duplication, feels like cucumber-expression features don't interact neatly with each other

📚 Any additional context?

I'm using cucumber-java, but since there are no examples in this repository, I assume this feature is lacking here and it's not an implementation-specific problem.

[sergei-kornilov]

Hi. You can handle that with custom type. There is enum example

public enum YourType {
    PERSON("Person"),
    SMTH("Smth");

    private final String value;

    YourType(String value) {
        this.value = value;
    }

    public static YourType fromValueIgnoreCase(String value) {
        for (YourType e : values()) {
            if (e.value.equalsIgnoreCase(value)) {
                return e;
            }
        }
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unknown type: %s!".formatted(value));
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return value;
    }
}

@ParameterType("(| as (?:Person|Smth))")
public YourType declareType(String rawValue) {
    if (rawType.isEmpty()) {
        return null;
    }
    return YourType.fromValueIgnoreCase(rawValue.substring(4));
}

Step: "Declare {string}{declareType}"
Examples:
Declare "this thing"
Declare "this thing" as that Person