Unit testing a modalInstance controller with Karma / Jasmine

Question

EDIT : Quick & Dirty solution at the end of this post

I am using a modal window from AngularUI-Bootstrap in the same way that it is explained on

Answer 1

I am solving this by just creating mock modal and modalInstance objects and verifying that they have been called by my controller code. Since modal and modalInstance are part of a third party library, it's not our responsibility to test that they work properly - rather, it's our responsibility to test that our code which calls the library is working ok.

Using your example:

describe('Controller: modalCtrl', function () {

  beforeEach(module('myApp'));

  var Ctrl;
  var scope;
  var modalInstance;

  // Initialize the controller and a mock scope
  beforeEach(inject(
    function ($controller, $rootScope) {     // Don't bother injecting a 'real' modal
      scope = $rootScope.$new();
      modalInstance = {                    // Create a mock object using spies
        close: jasmine.createSpy('modalInstance.close'),
        dismiss: jasmine.createSpy('modalInstance.dismiss'),
        result: {
          then: jasmine.createSpy('modalInstance.result.then')
        }
      };
      Ctrl = $controller('modalCtrl', {
        $scope: scope,
        $modalInstance: modalInstance,
        itemArray: function () { return ['a', 'b', 'c']; }
      });
    })
  );

  describe('Initial state', function () {
    it('should instantiate the controller properly', function () {
      expect(Ctrl).not.toBeUndefined();
    });

    it('should close the modal with result "true" when accepted', function () {
      scope.accept();
      expect(modalInstance.close).toHaveBeenCalledWith(true);
    });

    it('should close the modal with result "false" when rejected', function () {
      scope.reject();
      expect(modalInstance.close).toHaveBeenCalledWith(false);
    });
  });
});

This way, we don't really need any dependency on the Angular-UI objects and our unit tests are nice and isolated.