Angularjs Unit Testing: Am I doing it right? - unit-testing

Question

I started to write unit tests for my angular app.
However it seems to me that I use a lot of boilerplate code to init and test the controller.
In this Unit Test I want to test if a model from the scope is sent to the Api when I execute a function.
I needed 20 lines of code for this. This makes it inconvenient to write unit tests that do only one thing.
Do you have any tips on getting the code size to a smaller chunk?
This is my current unit test:
'use strict';
describe('controllers', function(){
beforeEach(module('kronos'));
describe('CustomerSignupCtrl', function() {
it('should send customer to Api on submit', inject(function($controller) {
var scope = {};
var $location = {};
var Api = {
signupCustomer: function(customer) {
expect(customer).toEqual({attrs: "customerdata"});
return {
success: function() { return this; },
error: function() { return this; }
};
}
};
var ctrl = $controller('CustomerSignupCtrl', {
$scope: scope,
$location: location,
Api: Api});
scope.customer = {attrs: "customerdata"};
scope.signup();
}));
});
});
What I don't like in particular are the following points
I need to init the all dependencies and it doesn't matter if I use them or not
The Api returns a promise that I only need because the controller is expecting the promise
I need to init the controller.
How can I make this code shorter and more explicit?
Edit: I just noticed I can ignore the $location Service for this unit test. Great
Edit2: I found out about angular-app, which serves as a good practice example app. There you can find specs with jasmine, which are really nice written.

Answer 1

Use another beforeEach method in your describe scope to set up scope, $location, controller etc, then just change them in your test as you need to. Js is dynamic so all should be fine.
You can also extract each object that you set up into a function so that you can reinitialise them in a test if you need to.
describe('controllers', function(){
beforeEach(module('kronos'));
describe('CustomerSignupCtrl', function() {
var controller, scope, $location, Api;
beforeEach(function(){
scope = {};
$location = {};
Api = {
signupCustomer: function(customer) {
expect(customer).toEqual({attrs: "customerdata"});
return {
success: function() { return this; },
error: function() { return this; }
};
}
};
controller = makeController();
})
function makeController(){
inject(function($controller){
controller = $controller('CustomerSignupCtrl', {
$scope: scope,
$location: location,
Api: Api});
});
}
it('should send customer to Api on submit', function() {
scope.customer = {attrs: "customerdata"};
scope.signup();
});
});
});

Answer 2

You can not shorten your code much. Things like initialization, mocking and assertion have to be done at some place. But you can improve the readability of your code by decoupling initialization and test code. Something like this:
describe('CustomerSignupCtrl', function(){
var controller, scope, location, api;
beforeEach(module('kronos'));
// initialization
beforeEach(inject(function($controller, $rootScope, $location, Api){
scope = $rootScope.$new();
location = $location;
api = Api;
controller = $controller('CustomerSignupCtrl', {
$scope: scope, $location: location, Api: api});
}));
// test
it('should send customer to Api on submit', function() {
scope.customer = {attrs: "customerdata"};
spyOn(api,'signupCustomer').andCallFake(function(customer) {
return {
success: function() { return this; },
error: function() { return this; }
};
});
scope.signup();
expect(api.signupCustomer).toHaveBeenCalledWith(scope.customer);
});
});