Ability

An ability is an arbitrary object which may be granted to Actors in order to allow them to interact with the application as part of a Performance. Unlike many other Screenplay object-types, there is no particular interface which Abilities must implement, as their functionality, capabilities and very nature are specific to them alone. That said - it is recommended for Abilities to implement ICanReport if possible, as this allows for the production of a more pleasant human-readable report.

Actions and/or Questions may interact directly with an actor's abilities in order to perform their functionality. Tasks, on the other hand, should not.

The purpose of abilities

Abilities typically have one (or more) of the following purposes.

• They provide a Gateway or Façade to external functionality
• They provide access to dependency services
• They provide a model of data, such as:
  • Secrets/access tokens for an API to be consumed by abilities
  • Contextual per-performance state

Abilities are intended to be used by Actions and/or Questions, not Tasks. Abilities provide the dependencies that those performables require, because performables cannot participate in constructor-injected dependency injection. Abilities can receive constructor-injected dependencies from DI, making them an ideal technique to provide dependencies to performables.