AngularJS Unit testing $location - unit-testing

Question

I am pretty new at unit testing and AngularJS and I have some issue that I can't fix. One of my test is not working. I am trying to initiate a location.path() in my test by affecting a value, but in my controller, location.path() still have a undefined value.
Here is my controler:
angular.module('...')
.controller('SignUpCtrl', ['$location', function ($location) {
// Retrieve type of user
var userType = $location.path().substr(9);
if(userType == 'member'){
userType = 'user';
}
console.log($location.path());
console.log(userType);
$scope.uType = userType; ]);
And here is my test module:
describe('Controller: SignUpCtrl', function () {
// load the controller's module
beforeEach(module('...'));
var SignUpCtrl,
scope,
mockBackend,
environments,
location,
store;
beforeEach(inject(function ($controller, $rootScope, $httpBackend,$location,_Environments_) {
environments = _Environments_;
mockBackend = $httpBackend;
location = $location;
scope = $rootScope.$new();
SignUpCtrl = $controller('SignUpCtrl', {
$scope: scope,
$location: location
});
}));
it('should come from the right location', function(){
location.path('/sign-up/member');
expect(location.path()).toBe('/sign-up/member');
expect(scope.uType).toBe('user'); //Do not work
});
});

Answer 1

You're trying to use unit testing to do something that can only really be achieved using End-to-End (or E2E) testing. Unit testing in AngularJS is designed to test the javascript within a given module or sub-module (such as a service, factory, directive, etc). However, things like page navigation or browser location really need to be tested in an end-to-end testing environment.
Because of that, your $location object won't have all the normal methods (like path, url, etc). The $location object ends up simply being a "mock" of the actual $location object that you'd get in your module. So, you just need to move your test case for it('should come from the right location', function(){ ... }) to an end-to-end test and then continue on with your other module-specific unit tests. After you do that, you can simplify the $controller by only grabbing the $scope variable, as in the following:
scope = $rootScope.new();
SignUpCtrl = $controller('SignUpCtrl', {$scope: scope});
The guide for E2E testing can be found at this link. It walks you through how to write good E2E tests. There is a really great framework available for doing angular E2E tests called Protractor. The info for that is at this link. Protractor will soon (in 1.2) replace Karma as a better way to handle E2E testing.