Unit Test Controller: Injected Service is empty or undefined

[Olivier Clément]

Hey Folks,

So I am at the early stages of an Proof of Concept I'm working on, and trying to get unit testing right, I want to test a very simple controller that relies on a service I wrote.

Right now, all it does is the controller calls a method on the service, that returns an array to the ctrl.

I can test whatever is in the scope of the controller, which is fine. But I cannot seem to access anything related to the service I (try to) inject in there. It appears empty, as if it were an empty object.

See this Spec file here: https://github.com/RIACC/arrr/blob/master/test/spec/list-view/controllers.js

I inlined comments to show what happens.

Feel free to clone and run 'grunt test' if you want to fiddle with this.

Thanks

[Ricardo Bin]

Hi,

I just have a quick look to your code... Did you try to use spyOn instead of jasmine.spyOn ?

[Olivier Clément]

Hey there

Thanks for the reply

I just tried spyOn: Looks like that was the answer (or part of it; I'm not sure due to my lack of unit testing experience)

It doesn't throw an error on the spyOn method now.

If I do 'expect obj.method toHaveBeenCalled', it fails on that. But that might be because of the fact that I call that method in the body of the controller directly? -> I mean, maybe the method hasn't been called when the test execute?

 Also, any idea why everywhere I see the use of 'jasmine.spyOn', while only 'spyOn' works for me?

Thank a lot, it's definitely a good step in the right direction though;

[Ricardo Bin]

Well, I use jasmine for years and always just use spyOn . BTW, even it their doc, the right use is this http://pivotal.github.io/jasmine/  :P

Maybe the expectation fails because articlesServices.getAllArticles dont exists. But $scope.articlesServices.getAllArticles should exists, and its your spy.

[Olivier Clément]

Again, thanks for your answers, I appreciate the help;

I have a global var 'service' to which I assign 'articlesService' in the 'beforeEach(inject ....)' block;

So technically I should be able to use 'expect(service.getAllArticles).toHaveBeenCalled() no?

Note: I tried spyOn($scope.articlesService, ...) -> spyOn could not find an object to spy upon for getAllArticles()

so I guess this won't ever work;

I can spyOn(service, ....) though

So going with that spy, which seems to do his work, doing:  

expect(service.getAllArticles).toHaveBeenCalled()

throws:

Expected spy getAllArticles to have been called.

Error: Expected spy getAllArticles to have been called.

Maybe the call is done after the assertion?

In the controller:

function ($scope, articlesService) {

var self;

self = this;

$scope.articles = {

list: []

};

$scope.articles.list = articlesService.getAllArticles();

[....]