Unit testing the output of $sce.trustAsHtml in Angular

Question

I am writing a REST app in Angular and I want to write unit tests for it (of course!). I have a controller which gets a list of blog posts from a REST service in json and puts the summaries into the $scope, so I can display them in the view.

At first the blog posts were just displaying as text ie <p>Blog body</p>, rather than rendering as parsed HTML, until I discovered that you can use ng-bind-html in conjunction with the $sce service. This now works fine in terms of displaying the blog posts correctly.

The problem arises when unit testing. I am trying to mock a json response with some HTML and then test that my controller is correctly dealing with the HTML. Here is my code:

Controller

.controller( 'HomeCtrl', function HomeController( $scope, $http, $sce ) {
    $scope.posts = {};
    $http.get('../drupal/node.json').success(function (data) {
        var posts;
        posts = data.list;

        for(var i = 0; i < posts.length; i ++) {
            posts[i].previewText = $sce.trustAsHtml(posts[i].body.summary);
            posts[i].created = posts[i].created + '000'; // add milliseconds so it can be properly formatted 
        }
        $scope.posts = posts;
    });
})

unit test

describe('HomeCtrl', function() {
    var $httpBackend, $rootScope, $sce, createController;

    beforeEach(inject(function ($injector) {
        // Set up the mock http service responses
        $httpBackend = $injector.get('$httpBackend');

        // Get hold of a scope (i.e. the root scope)
        $rootScope = $injector.get('$rootScope');
        // The $controller service is used to create instances of controllers
        var $controller = $injector.get('$controller');

        $sce = $injector.get('$sce');

        createController = function() {
            return $controller('HomeCtrl', {
                '$scope': $rootScope
            });
        };
    }));

    it('should get a list of blog posts', function() {
        var rawResponse = {
            "list": [
                {
                    "body": {
                        "value": "\u003Cp\u003EPost body.\u003C\/p\u003E\n",
                        "summary": "\u003Cp\u003ESummary.\u003C\/p\u003E\n"
                    },
                    "created": "1388415860"
                }
            ]};
        var processedResponse = [{
                "body": {
                    "value": "\u003Cp\u003EPost body.\u003C\/p\u003E\n",
                    "summary": "\u003Cp\u003ESummary.\u003C\/p\u003E\n"
                },
                "created": "1388415860000",
            previewText: $sce.trustAsHtml("\u003Cp\u003ESummary.\u003C\/p\u003E\n")
        }];

        $httpBackend.when('GET', '../drupal/node.json').respond(rawResponse);
        $httpBackend.expectGET("../drupal/node.json").respond(rawResponse);
        var homeCtrl = createController();
        expect(homeCtrl).toBeTruthy();
        $httpBackend.flush();
        expect($rootScope.posts).toEqual(processedResponse);
    });
});

When I run the above through the Karma test runner, I get the following response:

Chrome 31.0.1650 (Windows) home section HomeCtrl should get a list of blog posts FAILED
    Expected [ { body : { value : '<p>Post body.</p>
    ', summary : '<p>Summary.</p>
    ' }, created : '1388415860000', previewText : { $$unwrapTrustedValue : Function } }          ] to equal [ { body
: { value : '<p>Post body.</p>
    ', summary : '<p>Summary.</p>
    ' }, created : '1388415860000', previewText : { $$unwrapTrustedValue : Function } }     ].

I suspect the problem is due to the fact that $sce.trustAsHtml returns an object containing a function, rather than a string.

My question is, firstly, am I approaching this problem in the correct way?

Secondly, if so, how should I go about testing the output of $sce.trustAsHtml?

Bas Slagter Bas Slagter · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-31T11:13:38

Since the answer given by michael-bromley didn't work for me I want to point out another solution. In my case I was using a filter that wraps each occurrence of a string in another string with a span that has a class of 'highlight'. In other words, I want words to be highlighted. Here is the code:

angular.module('myModule').filter('highlight', function ($sce) {
    return function (input, str) {
        return $sce.trustAsHtml((input || '').replace(new RegExp(str, 'gi'), '<span class=\"highlighted\">$&</span>'));
    };
});

I use the $sce service to trust the resulting value as HTML. To test this I need to use the $$unwrapTrustedValue function on the resulting value to get my test working:

it('01: should add a span with class \'highlight\' around each mathing string.', inject(function ($filter) {
    // Execute
    var result = $filter('highlight')('this str contains a str that will be a highlighted str.', 'str');

    // Test
    expect(result.$$unwrapTrustedValue()).toEqual('this <span class="highlighted">str</span> contains a <span class="highlighted">str</span> that will be a highlighted <span class="highlighted">str</span>.'); 
}));

UPDATE:

As @gugol kindly pointed out it is preferred not to use Angular internal methods like $$unwrapTrustedValue. A better approach is to use the public getTrustedHtml method on the $sce service. Like so:

it('01: should add a span with class \'highlight\' around each mathing string.', inject(function ($sce, $filter) {
    // Execute
    var result = $filter('highlight')('this str contains a str that will be a highlighted str.', 'str');

    // Test
    expect($sce.getTrustedHtml(result)).toEqual('this <span class="highlighted">str</span> contains a <span class="highlighted">str</span> that will be a highlighted <span class="highlighted">str</span>.');
}));

Unit testing the output of $sce.trustAsHtml in Angular

Controller

unit test

4 Answers