Spreading promises in Protractor

Question

q library has this neat feature to resolve and spread multiple promises into separate arguments:

If you have a promise for an array, you can use sprea

Answer 1

TL;DR Apparently, it's not entirely safe to replace protractor.promise with q. For instance, I've got a hanging test run once I've decided to extend ElementArrayFinder:

• Take elements while a condition evaluates to true (extending ElementArrayFinder)

---

Old answer:

Here is what I've done to solve it.

I've replaced protractor.promise with q on the fly (not sure if it's actually safe to do):

onPrepare: {
    protractor.promise = require("q");
},

But, nothing broke so far and now I'm able to use spread() and other syntactic sugar provided by q through protractor.promise:

toBeActive: function() {
    return {
        compare: function(elm) {
            return {
                pass: protractor.promise.all([
                    elm.getId(),
                    browser.driver.switchTo().activeElement().getId()
                ]).spread(function (currentElementID, activeElementID) {
                    return jasmine.matchersUtil.equals(currentElementID, activeElementID);
                })
            };
        }
    };
}

Relevant github thread: protractor.promise to use q.