Angular 1.5+’s components are great, but testing them properly requires some changes to they way you were used to testing before.

Directives were always a bit clunky to test in Angular. You would either have to deal with recreating their DOM elements, or exposing the controller outside of the directive in order to test it directly. Since components are essentially wrappers around directives, you might expect the same dance.

But, along the introduction of components we also got the handy $componentController service. This service enables testing a component’s controller even without exposing it, and it also provides a simple way to supply a controller with bindings in the test.

Say that we have this component:

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app.component('foo', {
  bindings: {
    baz: '<',
    bar: '<'
  },
  controller: function() {},
  templateUrl: 'foo.html'
});

In order to get an instance of foo’s controller in a test, we’d write this code:

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var fooCtrl = $componentController('foo', null, {
  baz: 'baz value',
  bar: 'bar value'
});

As you can see, $componentController receives the name of the component that we’d like to test and also the bindings it should be initialized with, and returns the instantiated controller.

You can now start testing the controller, by invoking its functions and asserting the different results:

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expect(fooCtrl.getDisplayResult()).to.equal('baz value bar value')

Don’t forget $onInit

In case your component implements the $onInit lifecycle hook, which is very likely starting from Angular 1.6, you should make sure to explicitly call it in your tests. Angular and $componentController does not take care of that for you, for different reasons.

This means that the test above should look like this:

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var fooCtrl = $componentController('foo', null, {...});
fooCtrl.$onInit();
expect(fooCtrl.getDisplayResult()).to.equal('baz value bar value')

That’s it!

Handling $onChanges is even trickier in tests, make sure to subscribe below to get the next part about it.