Behat3 redirect within custom step - behat

Question

I am trying to redirect to a url from within a custom step. That was doable on behat 2.x via:
return new Step\Then("my/url/page");
Unfortunately you can not call external steps from within your custom steps in behat 3.0!
How can I perform a redirect in my custom step?

Answer 1

Step chaining was removed from Behat 3 as it's considered a bad practice.
As explained by everzet:
Use the code tools like abstraction, compositions and inheritance together with a simple method calls :) Chained steps was an anti-pattern. It was hard to debug and maintain them. And in most cases, what could be done with 2-3 chained steps could be done with 1-2 method calls.
And here:
Because as soon as you start doing that you:
Can not refactor your contexts
Can not clearly see what the code actually does
Can not easily reword your features
And if you think that using inline steps is easier:
return array(
new Step\Given(‘I am on the homepage’),
new Step\When(‘I follow ”Login”’),
new Step\When(‘I fill ”Username” with “‘ . $username . '"’),
new Step\When(‘I fill ”Password” with “‘ . $password . '"’),
new Step\When(‘I click “Login"’),
);
It is not:
$session = $this->getSession();
$page = $session->getPage();
$session->visit($this->locateUrl(‘/‘));
$page->clickLink(‘Login’);
$page->fillField(‘Username’, $username);
$page->fillField(‘Password’, $password);
$page->pressButton(‘Login’);
Also see https://github.com/Behat/Behat/issues/546
There's an extension for Behat 3 with step chaining implementation, but it is broken and it's unlikely it'll be ever officially supported: https://github.com/Behat/ChainedStepsExtension
Solution
To solve your problem you can extend the Behat\MinkExtension\Context\RawMinkContext and use it to access the session:
$this->getSession()->visitPath('my/url/page');
You could also look at the page object extension.