Using ng-describe for end-to-end testing with protractor

Question

I've recently discovered an awesome ng-describe package that makes writing unit tests for AngularJS applications very transparent by abstracting away all of the boilerplate code you have to remember/look up and write in order to load, inject, mock or spy.

Has somebody tried to use ng-describe with protractor? Does it make sense and can we benefit from it?

---

One of the things that caught my eye is how easy you can mock the HTTP responses:

ngDescribe({
  inject: '$http', // for making test calls
  http: {
    get: {
      '/my/url': 42, // status 200, data 42
      '/my/other/url': [202, 42], // status 202, data 42,
      '/my/smart/url': function (method, url, data, headers) {
        return [500, 'something is wrong'];
      } // status 500, data "something is wrong"
    }, 
    post: {
      // same format as GET
    }
  },
  tests: function (deps) {
    it('responds', function (done) {
      deps.$http.get('/my/other/url')
        .then(function (response) {
          // response.status = 202
          // response.data = 42
          done();
        });
      http.flush();
    });
  }
});

Mocking HTTP responses usually helps to achieve a better e2e coverage and test how does UI reacts to specific situations and how does the error-handling work. This is something we are currently doing with protractor-http-mock, there are also other options which don't look as easy as it is with ng-describe.

Answer 1

Protractor primary is intended for E2E testing (with selenium webdriver) and that means that you need to have an actual backend hooked up (it could be a mock backend also). As the creator of Protractor wrote here, your application code runs separately with the test code and it isn't possible to gain easy access to the $http service.

By mocking the backend calls you are not doing E2E testing anymore even if you are using tool for E2E tests like Protractor. Why not to return to unit testing then. The only difference will be that you will use jQuery instead the Protractor API and the tests will be run with Karma. Then you can easily use ng-describe and $httpBackend which primary are intended to be used in unit tests.

However if you like to continue with this approach you can check the comments in this Protractor issue. There are several guys that are proposing solutions for this problem and as mentioned you are already using one of them. But in this case ng-describe won't help you much.

I hope that this answers your question.