expectHEAD is documented but not implemented?

Question

In our internal angularjs project, one of the services has $http.head() call which I'm trying to test.

For testing, I'm using Fake HTTP backend provided by angular-mocks. Here is the relevant code:

it('handle status code 200', inject(function ($httpBackend, ConnectionService) {
    spyOn(Math, 'random').andReturn(0.1234);

    httpBackend = $httpBackend;
    httpBackend.expectHEAD('ping?rand=1234').respond(200);
    ConnectionService.sendRequest();
    httpBackend.flush();

    expect(ConnectionService.stats.packetsReceived).toEqual(5);

    httpBackend.verifyNoOutstandingExpectation();
    httpBackend.verifyNoOutstandingRequest();
}));

Running the test results into the following error:

PhantomJS 1.9.7 (Mac OS X) connection service tests sendRequest function handle status code 200 
FAILED  TypeError: 'undefined' is not a function (evaluating 'httpBackend.expectHEAD('ping?rand=1234')')
at /path/to/app/app-connection-service_test.js:66
at d (/path/to/app/bower_components/angular/angular.min.js:35)
at workFn (/path/to/app/bower_components/angular-mocks/angular-mocks.js:2159)

After digging a little bit, I've found the relevant github issue:

• fix($httpBackend): Add missing expectHEAD() and expectOPTIONS() methods

which, as far as I understand, means that there really is not expectHEAD() method in angular-mocks - it is documented, but, in reality, it is not yet a part of a stable angular release.

What is the best way to proceed?

Note that I have to stay with angular <= 1.2, since this app needs to run on IE8 (Angular 1.3 is dropping support for IE8).

---

One of the workarounds I'm thinking about currently is to replace head() with get(). In this case, I can test it with existing expectGET() method. But I'm not sure about the drawbacks.

Answer 1

You could just add in the change yourself: https://github.com/revolunet/angular.js/commit/b2955dd52725241dd9519baa12fe8ca74659004b

It's a one line change in angular-mocks.js on line 1523:

1523: -    angular.forEach(['GET', 'DELETE', 'JSONP'], function(method) {
1523: +    angular.forEach(['GET', 'DELETE', 'JSONP', 'HEAD'], function(method) {    

Seeing as you have to stay with a non-current version of Angular anyways, it shouldn't cause too many issues in the future.

Edit: reviewing JoelJeske's answer, he makes a good point - you could easily do this without forking. The one change I would make to his solution, is instead of calling the method directly

$httpBackend.expect('HEAD', 'ping?rand=1234').respond(200);

I would instead create the shortcut method directly:

$httpBackend.expectHEAD = function(url, headers) {
    return $httpBackend.expect('HEAD', url, undefined, headers);
};

And then you can do:

$httpBackend.expectHEAD('ping?rand=1234').respond(200);

Answer 2

As opposed to forking and editing a library, it would be much better practice to use the underlying method.

$httpBackend.expect('HEAD', 'ping?rand=1234').respond(200);

The other method you cannot use is just a shortcut method. It is much better and easier to use this method than changing the library.