The cart page was redesigned. Same flow, different markup. We have checkout.spec.ts from March and a feature that came out of it back then.
Do I re-record from scratch or patch the spec? Genuinely unsure which is less work, and I do not want to lose the name and the tags in the process.
Re-record. The spec carries the command that made it, in the header comment at the top:
// Recorded with SDODS. Re-record with: sdods record -p demo-shop -e staging --name checkout --user standardRun that line back. The same --name writes the same file, so git diff shows you exactly what the redesign changed and nothing else. That diff is the artefact you actually want — patching by hand gives you a spec that works and tells you nothing about what moved.
Tags survive too: post-processing puts @recorded @ui @regression back on the describe block every time, plus whatever you passed as --tag.
The feature is a separate question from the recording, and mostly it should not move.
If the steps describe what a person does — add to cart, check out, see the confirmation — a redesign should touch the page object underneath them and leave the feature alone. So look at the page object first. If the diff really does suggest rewriting the feature, that is a signal the steps were describing the markup rather than the behaviour, and it is worth fixing while you have a reason to be in there.
Two cautions on re-recording over an existing file.
The first re-record after a gap will stop and log in for you, because the cached storage state for that role has aged out. That is the extra minute, not the redesign breaking something.
And the same --name means codegen overwrites the file. If anybody hand-edited that spec, their edits are gone — post-processing also strips its own header lines before rewriting, so nothing at the top of the file survives either.
If you are doing several variants in one sitting — the redesign as standard, as problem user, and on a phone — the Recorder page is less typing than four CLI invocations, and it shows you the post-processed spec as soon as you close the codegen window.
Give each variant a distinct name — checkout, checkout-problem, checkout-mobile — or the second one overwrites the first, which is the same overwrite Reeta is warning about.
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