Spying on JQuery Selectors in Jasmine

I am unit testing some JavaScript with Jasmine and wish to spy on (mock) an element of the DOM that is accessed by a jQuery selector.

My spec is:

it("should be able to mock DOM call", function() {

    spyOn($("#Something"), 'val').andReturn("bar");

    result = $("#Something").val();

    expect(result).toEqual("bar");

});

In my specrunner.html I have:

<input type="hidden" id="Something" value="foo" />

Unfortunately the spec fails with:

>should be able to mock DOM call Expected 'foo' to equal 'bar'.

This line is wrong:

spyOn($("#Something"), 'val').andReturn("bar");

Jasmine's spyOn function expects two parameters. The first is an existing object. The second is a function name as a string. You are correctly passing in the function name as a string ("val") but you are not passing in an existing object as the first parameter.

$("#Something")

...is not an existing object. It is the result (the return value) of a jQuery selector. More specifically, it will return a jQuery object representing the matched nodes - kind of like an array of results.

$

...is an existing object.

$.fn

...is an existing object.

$("#Something")

...is not an existing object - it is the result of a jQuery selector.

This will work:

it("should be able to mock DOM call", function () {
    //spyOn($.fn, "val").andReturn("bar"); //pre-jasmine 2.0 syntax
    spyOn($.fn, "val").and.returnValue("bar"); //Jasmine 2.0 Syntax
    var result = $("#Something").val();
    expect(result).toEqual("bar");
});

Seems like I found good solution

    it "should open past statuses", ->
      # We can't use $('.past') here cause each time $('.past') called it returns different objects
      # so we need to store spy in variable
      showSpy = spyOn($.fn, 'show')
      # do the stuff
      $('.show-past').click()
      # then check if 'show' action was called
      expect($.fn.show).toHaveBeenCalled()
      # and if it realy our object
      expect(showSpy.mostRecentCall.object.selector).toEqual('.past')

This is not based on your code but i hope this can help someone. And, yes, example in CoffeScript.

The problem is that the two calls to $ return two different jQuery-wrapped nodes.

This should work:

it("should be able to mock DOM call", function(){

  // var node = $("Something");
  // spyOn(node, 'val').andReturn('bar');
  
  // expect(node.val()).toEqual('bar');
  var node = $("Something");
  spyOn(node, 'val').and.returnValue('bar');

  expect(node.val()).toEqual('bar');
});

Next time, help is more prevalent on the Jasmine mailing list: [email protected].

You could create your own fake DOM element and then use $('#elementid')[0] as usual

addFakeElementWithId = function (elementId) {
      var fake = document.createElement("div");
      fake.setAttribute("id", elementId);
      document.body.appendChild(fake);
   };

I wrote a helper-function, which accepts an array of id/value-pairs.

var jasminTestHelper = {
    spyOnValAndFake : function(obj) {
        var i, j;
        spyOn($.fn, 'val').andCallFake(function() {
            for ( i = 0, j = obj.length; i < j; i++) {
                if (this.selector === '#' + obj[i][0]) {
                    return obj[i][1];
                }
            }
        })
    }
}

Each pair tells the faker-function for which id, which value should be returned if the jQuery-val()-function is called with the id-selector. It is used like this:

jasminTestHelper.spyOnValAndFake([["id1", "value1"], ["id2", "value2"]]);

If $('#id1').val() is called in your function under test, the fake-function returns value1, if $('#id2').val() is called it returns value2. So you don't need to fiddle with the DOM, you just mock the jQuery-val()-function and simulate return-values. Other jQuery-functions could probably mocked the same way.

I think there is a change in my jasmine version (2.0.3), hence the solution by Alex York didn't work as is, but definitely gave me a path. So here is the working spec jquery code which is to be tested

$('someSelector').data('someAttribute').enable();

here is the jasmine spec part of it

var mockJqueryObject = { enable:function(){},disable:function(){}};
//this mocks the .data('someAttribute') in above code.
spyOn($.fn, "data").and.returnValue(mockSelectBoxObject); 

A more granular spec could use another level of mock as

spyOn(mockJqueryObject,"enable")
spyOn(mockJqueryObject,"disable")