LaxarJS Mocks

The companion testing framework for LaxarJS widgets.

What is LaxarJS Mocks?

LaxarJS Mocks simplifies writing tests for LaxarJS widgets, and helps running them.

It is a library that allows you to instantiate a testing sandbox for widgets, and that helps you to mock the services and the lifecycle events that LaxarJS provides. Use LaxarJS Mocks on top of Jasmine to setup and load a widget just like in an actual application. The available APIs then support you in instrumenting and inspecting the widget under test.

Although most widgets only have little direct dependency on LaxarJS (often they use only its event bus) and should mostly follow the best practices for their rendering technology such as AngularJS, React or Vue.js, they rely on a specific setup process provided by the LaxarJS runtime and tools.

This setup process includes

• acquiring relevant assets (such as templates and stylesheets),
• providing configuration and services (such as the event bus),
• creation of the controller and rendering at the right time,
• publishing the initial lifecycle events.

LaxarJS Mocks provides a programmatic interface to control this process and to load a widget within a test. It comes with the laxar-mocks/spec-loader for webpack, which makes sure that all controls and assets required for a widget test are collected, and that the appropriate adapter is loaded.

For an introduction to LaxarJS Mocks and details on test runner setup, have a look at the manuals. Additionally the API docs provide detailed information on the configuration, instrumentation and inspection options.

Getting Started

Usually, LaxarJS projects are started from the Yeoman Generator for LaxarJS 2.x, which automatically sets up LaxarJS Mocks for you, along with webpack and karma. If you need to perform a manual setup, for example as part of upgrading a LaxarJS 1.x project, there is an additional setup manual.

Hacking the Library

Instead of using a pre-compiled library within a project, you can also clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/LaxarJS/laxar-mocks.git
cd laxar-mocks
npm install

To see changes in your application, either configure your project to work with the sources (e.g. by using webpack), or rebuild the webpack bundles by running npm run dist.

To run the automated karma tests:

npm test

To generate HTML spec runners for opening in your web browser, so that you can e.g. use the browser's developer tools:

npm start

Now you open the spec-runner by browsing to http://localhost:8081/dist/spec/laxar-mocks.spec.html.