I'm defining a feature to be used in a BDD workflow with tools such as Behat or Cucumber, using the Gherkin language. This is the feature definition so far:
Feature: Save Resource
In order to keep interesting resources that I want to view later
As a user
I need to be able to save new resources
Scenario: Saving a new resource
Given "http://google.com" is a valid link
When I insert "http://google.com" as the new resource link
And I insert "Google Search Engine" as the new resource title
Then I should see a confirmation message with the inserted link and title
When I accept
Then I should have 1 additional resource with the inserted link and title
Scenario: Aborting saving a new resource
Given "http://google.com" is a valid link
When I insert "http://google.com" as the new resource link
And I insert anything as the new resource title
Then I should see a confirmation message with the inserted link and title
When I abort
Then I should have the same number of resources as before
Scenario: Saving a resource with invalid link
Given "http://invalid.link" is an invalid link
When I insert "http://invalid.link" as the new resource link
And I insert anything as the new resource title
Then I should see a confirmation message with the inserted link and title
When I accept
Then I should see an error message telling me that the inserted link is invalid
Scenario: Saving a resource with already saved link
Given "http://google.com" is an already saved link
When I insert "http://google.com" as the new resource link
And I insert anything as the new resource title
Then I should see a confirmation message with the inserted link and title
When I accept
Then I should see an error message telling me that the inserted link already exists
As you can see, there's a lot of boilerplate repeated in several scenarios. I know I could define a Background with a list of steps to be executed before all scenarios, where I could put all the steps up to the confirmation message, but if I did that, I wouldn't be able to distinguish among different links and titles that the user might have inserted.
Is it possible to define a background that is used only for certain, and not all, scenarios? Or maybe to concatenate two scenarios, for example requiring that a certain scenario (that I can reuse) is run before another? Or should I simply keep repeating the boilerplate?
Following on from Thomas' answer
Your scenarios are complicated and repetitive because each time they are describing 'how' the user interacts with the application. 'How' has no place in scenarios because
The details of how you do things are likely to change as you learn more about what you are doing. You don't want to have to change your scenarios every time you change a detail of how you do something
Putting how in you scenarios makes them boring, repetitive, difficult to read and expensive to implement.
Putting how is your scenarios is generally a way of avoiding doing the real work that scenarios are here for, which is to find out 'why' your are doing something and define elegantly and succinclty 'what' you are trying to achieve.
n.b. there are lots of other reasons
Lets look at how simple your scenarios become when you do this extra bit of work
##Old
Scenario: Saving a new resource
Given "http://google.com" is a valid link
When I insert "http://google.com" as the new resource link
And I insert "Google Search Engine" as the new resource title
Then I should see a confirmation message with the inserted link and title
When I accept
Then I should have 1 additional resource with the inserted link and title
##New
Scenario: Bookmarking
When I save a bookmark
Then my bookmark should be saved
##Old
Scenario: Saving a resource with invalid link
Given "http://invalid.link" is an invalid link
When I insert "http://invalid.link" as the new resource link
And I insert anything as the new resource title
Then I should see a confirmation message with the inserted link and title
When I accept
Then I should see an error message telling me that the inserted link is invalid
##New
Scenario: Bookmark with invalid link
When I bookmark with an invalid link
Then I should see an invalid link error
etc.
Note how the new scenarios illustrate so clearly just how little you are doing in terms of adding business value!!
As for your question about backgrounds, if you need two different backgrounds you need two different .feature files. This is a good thing!!