Angular Unit Testing a resource request - unit-testing

Question

I am attempting to perform a unit test on this controller.
angular.module('app.dashboard', [])
.controller('DashboardController', ['$scope', 'myAppService'], function($scope, myAppService) {
var _data = myAppService.requests.get(function() {
$scope.requests = _data.requests;
});
});
myAppService is a service based on ngResource.
I want to test for the number of requests. I spent all day figuring out how to get $httpBackend injected, now I'm hung up on properly measuring the data.
beforeEach(inject(function ($controller, $rootScope, $injector) {
$httpBackend = $injector.get('$httpBackend');
$httpBackend.when('GET', '/api/requests').respond(
{requests: [{sender: 'joe', message: 'help'}, {sender: 'larry', message: 'SOS'}]}
);
});
it('should have a properly working Dashboard controller', inject(function($rootScope, $controller, $httpBackend) {
var $scope = $rootScope.$new();
var ctrl = $controller('DashboardController', {
$scope : $scope
});
expect($scope.requests.length).toBe(2);
}));
Any assistance would be greatly, massively appreciated.

Answer 1

For the most part, everything looks ok. There are two things that I think might be missing from your code though.
First, this method doesn't look quite right:
var _data = myAppService.requests.get(function() {
$scope.requests = _data.requests;
});
If you are providing a callback function, shouldn't that be passing in the data:
myAppService.requests.get(function(_data) {
$scope.requests = _data.requests;
});
It is hard to tell without seeing your myAppService code (that is using $resource).
Second, in order to flush through the ajax response you need to call $httpBackend.flush(); before you make your assertion with expect:
var $scope = $rootScope.$new();
var ctrl = $controller('DashboardController', {
$scope : $scope
});
httpBackend.flush();
expect($scope.requests.length).toBe(2);
From the $httpBackend docs:
flush(count):
Flushes all pending requests using the trained responses.
Hope this helps.