How can I make Protractor NOT wait for $timeout?

Question

I'm testing my angular application with Protractor. Once the user is logged in to my app, I set a $timeout to do some job in one hour (so if the user was logged-in in 13:00, the $timeout will run at 14:00). I keep getting these failures:

"Timed out waiting for Protractor to synchronize with the page after 20 seconds. Please see https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/docs/faq.md. The following tasks were pending: - $timeout: function onTimeoutDone(){....."

I've read this timeouts page: https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/docs/timeouts.md so I understand Protractor waits till the page is fully loaded which means he's waiting for the $timeout to complete...

How can I make Protractor NOT wait for that $timeout? I don't want to use:

browser.ignoreSynchronization = true;

Because then my tests will fail for other reasons (other angular components still needs the time to load...)

Answer 1

The solution will be to flush active timeouts (as @MBielski mentioned it in comments), but original flush method itself is available only in anuglar-mocks. To use angular-mocks directly you will have to include it on the page as a <script> tag and also you'll have to deal with all overrides it creates, it produces a lot of side effects. I was able to re-create flush without using angular-mocks by listening to any timeouts that get created and then reseting them on demand.

For example, if you have a timeout in your Angular app:

$timeout(function () {
    alert('Hello World');
}, 10000); // say hello in 10 sec

The test will look like:

it('should reset timeouts', function () {

    browser.addMockModule('e2eFlushTimeouts', function () {

        angular
        .module('e2eFlushTimeouts', [])
        .run(function ($browser) {

            // store all created timeouts
            var timeouts = [];

            // listen to all timeouts created by overriding
            // a method responsible for that
            var originalDefer = $browser.defer;

            $browser.defer = function (fn, delay) {
                // originally it returns timeout id
                var timeoutId = originalDefer.apply($browser, arguments);
                // store it to be able to remove it later
                timeouts.push({ id: timeoutId, delay: delay });
                // preserve original behavior
                return timeoutId;
            };

            // compatibility with original method
            $browser.defer.cancel = originalDefer.cancel;

            // create a global method to flush timeouts greater than @delay
            // call it using browser.executeScript()
            window.e2eFlushTimeouts = function (delay) {
                timeouts.forEach(function (timeout) {
                    if (timeout.delay >= delay) {
                        $browser.defer.cancel(timeout.id);
                    }
                });
            };

        });

    });


    browser.get('example.com');

    // do test stuff

    browser.executeScript(function () {
        // flush everything that has a delay more that 6 sec
        window.e2eFlushTimeouts(6000); 
    });

    expect(something).toBe(true);
});

It's kinda experimental, I am not sure if it will work for your case. This code can also be simplified by moving browser.addMockModule to a separate node.js module. Also there may be problems if you'd want to remove short timeouts (like 100ms), it can cancel currently running Angular processes, therefore the test will break.