After some more time playing around, the use of aliases are cool but only exist within a specify/it function call which makes sense. I'm aware of the anti-pattern of trying to not use variables to get around this. I will go make a feature request for this, in the mean time I want to understand how this best fits with how Cypress should be used, what other means I should be thinking about. I was thinking about the idea of given an array, to repeat the same test or group of tests in a more clean way. If violating the norms, I would do something like this.

[ "table", "of", "items" ].forEach((item)=>{
  it(`Item: ${item}`, ()=>{
    expect(item).to.be.a("string");
  })
})

I'm not a fan of the idea that I should have a fixture/table because the data is mutable, it doesn't feel right. I want to use data from within my application. So the best way felt like creating larger and larger single tests to cover both which also doesn't feel right.

This is all kind of nebulas and that maybe hasn't helped here. So there's two API endpoints called

/api/creatives

and

/api/creative/${uuid}

which I'm testing. Right now using a staging database to make sure all the basics are there, at a later stage I want to build up mocking and testing from a blank database upwards. Here's a sample of what I mean.

js
describe("GET: api/creatives/", () => {
    beforeEach(() => {
        cy.fixture('defaultUserDetails').then((userDetails)=>{
            cy.session_login(userDetails.name, userDetails.user, userDetails.pass)
        })
    })
    it(`should return all non archived data`, () => {
        //cy.fixture('creatives_temp').then((response) => {
        cy.request("/api/creatives").then((response) => {
            expect(response.status).to.eq(200);
            expect(response.headers["content-type"]).to.eq("application/json");
            expect(response.body).to.be.a("array");

            return response.body
        }).then((data) => {
            data.forEach((element) => {
                cy.request(`/api/creative/${element.uuid}`).then((response)=>{
                    expect(response.status).to.eq(200);
                    expect(response.headers["content-type"]).to.eq("application/json");
                    expect(response.body).to.be.a("array");

                    return response.body
                }).then((specific)=>{
                    expect(element.id).to.be.a("number").be.finite.and.eq(specific.id);
                    expect(element.name).to.be.a("string").that.match(/^[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{12}$/i).and.eq(specific.name);
                    expect(element.uuid).to.be.a("string").that.match(/^[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[1-5][0-9a-f]{3}-[89ab][0-9a-f]{3}-[0-9a-f]{12}$/i).and.eq(specific.uuid);
                })
                
            })
        })
    })
})

This just doesn't feel like the right way to do it

How would you use something like this with an alias?

The docs don't immediately show it and I wonder how much Cypress will complain about it being out of scope. Only one way to find out ig

I'm going to try it out anyway and see how it works, thank you for this

Okay it doesn't work as I thought.

before(()=>{
  cy.fixture('creatives_temp').then((response) => {
    expect(response.status).to.eq(200);
      expect(response.headers["content-type"]).to.eq("application/json");
      expect(response.body).to.be.a("array");

      return response.body
  }).as("test_state")
})
it.each(cy.get("@test_state"))("Test %s", (item)=>{
  cy.log(item)
})

Was my immediate thought

A fixture being used here to make it quicker to debug/test, exact same data as a normal http request