Data read from excel workbooks in cucumber

[ashkaps]

Hi,

I am looking for some hooks or pre-conditions that let's me read data from excel sheet when I am using cucumber.
Using Scenario Outline and Examples sounds useful but that becomes very difficult to manage when I have many steps in my test case and I want to pass multiple parameters.

I have googled this a lot and so far I have found no so very elegant solutions for this.
What I really want is that when the cucumber passes parameter values from steps to the glue code, the correct values are passed. What I will pass in my steps is the column name from excel.
Q1 - So is there some functionality available with cucumber that allows me to read test data from external files - excel, json?

Q2 - If not, is it possible to update the values of Example rows that are passed from Step to glue code?
I have tried to use Hooks to see if Examples is allowed as one of the params. Sadly only Scenario class is allowed as a param.

[brasmusson]

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