CanJS: Unit testing of different parts

Question

I have one question. I've started to use CanJS just recently and trying to create unit tests (funcunit / jasmine ) that will work in maven build with TeamCity (headless).

It was relatively easy to test Model, because it doesn't rely on any view and you can create instance and test functionality. But it not so clear for me how to test Components and other parts of CanJS. Just to clarify i don't need E2E tests with user interaction, what i'm trying to achieve is just have some data provided by Can.fixtures and then just test that my functions works fine by calling them in tests.

Answer 1

Controller tests benefit from the addition of jasmine-fixture to your Jasmine test bed. You can affix() the appropriate DOM elements and instantiate the controller in beforeEach() before adding spies to the instance or the controller prototype, then fire events or directly call functions requiring some DOM tree to be available.

For Components, there's one more step involved. Because of the way Components are instantiated, either you have to use can.view() to create and attach their custom elements to the DOM (and clean it up in afterEach()), or you have to use can.view.callbacks.tagHandler(el, tag_name) to manually instantiate the Component for an element already in the DOM.

To be clear, this makes things easier when your controller/component functions are slurping data from the DOM, as in event handlers. It also works to just call the functions directly on the prototype and make spy objects for this.scope and this.options