Protractor test vs long-polling

Question

I have an Angular web app that continuously listens for notifications from the backend via long-poll:

scope.notification = $resource('/notification').get();

This request never completes in the test environment. This is a problem for Protractor, because it wants to wait for all outstanding HTTP requests to finish.

I see a number of potential solutions, but have some issues with all of them.

I do not see a way to tell Protractor to ignore this request. Issuing it from $interval (which itself is ignored) is not a solution. Protractor will not wait for the request to be sent, but once it's sent, it will still wait for it to complete.

So I'm trying not to send this request when running the tests. But how do I know I'm in a test?

• I could add a flag to the URL (?protractor=true). But my web app modifies the URL all the time, so it would get cleared quickly.
• I tried setting a variable: browser.executeScript('window.runningProtractorTests = true;'); But it seems Protractor will wait for the page to sync first before running executeScript. And I'm sending the request right away when the page loads.
• I could set a cookie. But it's fairly cumbersome, e.g. I'd have to load the page twice. (See issue 341 for more difficulties.)
• I could set a user agent. It's not easy either. I would need to set browser flags for each browser in the config file. I do not want to completely override the user agent (to Protractor, for example) out of fear that my libraries may rely on interpreting the user agent string, so I'd have to figure out the right string.
• I could check if the server is running on a specific port. But then a year from now someone will try to run the production server on the same port and not understand why the notifications don't work.
• Making the test backend complete the request immediately does not help, because it's immediately sent again whenever it completes. But I guess I could introduce a special "you are in a test" notification and stop the polling when this is received. This would mean a (small) change to our protocol, so I'd rather avoid it if possible.

Is there no straightforward way to do this?

Answer 1

Can you put the calls to $resource into a service which you mock out using Protractor's browser.addMockModule()? That way, Protractor will always override your original service before it has a chance to run.

This could look something like

// in your application
myModule.service('myNotificationService', function($resource) {
  this.notification = $resource('/notification').get();
});

// In your Protractor test
browser.addMockModule('notificatonOverride', function() {
  angular.module('notificationOverride').service('myNotificationService', function() {
    this.notification = {}; // or whatever you need here.
  });
});