Component Testing: Services (DRAFT) 6.0


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Components make use of services to accomplish tasks such as accessing and persisting data. Your main choice, when testing a component that uses services, will be to decide whether or not to mock the service. This page illustrates how to do both.

Using real, locally provided services

The AppComponent from part 4 of the tutorial declares its need for a HeroService by including the service in the @Component provider list:

toh-4/lib/app_component.dart (locally provided service)

@Component(
  selector: 'my-app',
  // ···
  providers: [ClassProvider(HeroService)],
)
class AppComponent implements OnInit {
  List<Hero> heroes = <Hero>[];
  final HeroService _heroService;

  AppComponent(this._heroService);
  // ···
}

No special measures are necessary to test AppComponent with a (real) HeroService. For components under test, such locally provided services are instatiated, as usual, thanks to Angular’s dependency injection subsystem.

Component-external services: mock or real

When testing a component that expects a service, you need to supply the NgTestBed with a root injector factory. The provider list of the generated injector factory can contain both real and mock services, as shown here:

toh-5/test/heroes_test.dart (rootInjector)

import 'package:angular_tour_of_heroes/src/hero_list_component.template.dart'
    as ng;
// ···
import 'heroes_test.template.dart' as self;
// ···
@GenerateInjector([
  ClassProvider(HeroService),
  ClassProvider(Router, useClass: MockRouter),
])
final InjectorFactory rootInjector = self.rootInjector$Injector;

void main() {
  final testBed = NgTestBed<HeroListComponent>(
    ng.HeroListComponentNgFactory,
    rootInjector: rootInjector,
  );
  // ···
}

See Component Testing: Routing Components for details concerning the use of mock routers.

Mocking locally provided services

Mock locally provided services (to the component under test) in the same way as for component-external services: add the requisite mock providers to the NgTestBed before instantiating the fixture.