AngularJS, prevent init method on controller from launching during jasmine tests

angularjs, initialization, jasmine

Solution

It is a bit hard to provide precise guidance without seeing a live code example (this is why it is usually a good idea to provide a plunk that has a template for Jasmine tests) but it sounds like your `init` method executes some setup logic that should be different depending on the environment. If so the way to move forward would be to encapsulate this initialization logic into a dedicated service and mock this service during testing (this is exactly what @Joe Dyndale is suggesting).

Provided that your controller looks like follows:

app.controller('MainCtrl', function($scope) {
  $scope.init = function() {
    //something I really don't want to call during test
    console.log("I'm executing");
  };
});

It could be refactored to:

app.factory('InitService', function() {
  return {
    init = function() {
      //something I really don't want to call during test
      console.log("I'm executing");
    }
  };
});

app.controller('MainCtrl', function($scope, InitService) {
  InitService.init();
});

and then the test with mocking could look like so:

describe('Testing an initializing controller', function() {
  var $scope, ctrl;

  //you need to indicate your module in a test
  beforeEach(module('plunker'));
  beforeEach(module(function($provide){
    $provide.factory('InitService', function() {
      return {
        init: angular.noop
      };
    });
  }));
  beforeEach(inject(function($rootScope, $controller) {
    $scope = $rootScope.$new();
    ctrl = $controller('MainCtrl', {
      $scope: $scope
    });
  }));

  it('should test sth on a controller', function() {
    //
  });
});

Finally here is a live code in plunker

Problem

I have a controller with a init() method launched on instantiation. It does a bunch of things which are useful for my app in a live environment, but that messes up with my unit-tests spies. Is there a way to prevent its call when instantiating the controller in the unit-test environment ? Or maybe a way to have it called automatically in the webapp context without making an explicit call to init() at the end of the controller code ?

Original source