Feature Request: Providing a replacement in MockComponent by adding a second parameter

[Martinspire]

Describe the feature or problem you'd like to solve

Ever since Angular Standalone was introduced, I found the boilerplate for overriding components to be a bit tedious.

For example:

const createComponent = createComponentFactory({
  component: SomeComponent,
  imports: [],
  overrideComponents: [
    [
      SomeComponent,
      {
        remove: {
          imports: [ChildComponent]
        },
        add: {
          imports: [MockChildComponent]
        },
      },
    ],
  ],
});

For many projects I use NG-Mocks to easily create components to override my components, but often I need more than just a mock and want to do some custom logic in there. But it would be nice if we could do the following solution.

Proposed solution

  imports: [
     MockComponent(ChildComponent, MockChildComponent),
  ],

In this case when the second parameter is provided, it will do the overriding itself and it prevents me from writing a lot of boilerplate to do it.

For the array of components, perhaps a similar setup could be done by providing an array, but I don't think many people are using that yet, but here's an example:

  imports: [
     MockComponents(Othercomponent, [ChildComponent, MockChildComponent], AnotherComponent),
  ],

Additional context

By using this setup, it becomes a lot easier to figure out what role your mocked component is going to play and make the tests use less boilerplate and code to set up.

[satanTime]

Hi @Martinspire, from what you've described, it sounds like you need to use MockBuilder and simply create TestBed via MockBuilder(ChildComponent) to avoid many lines of code.

[Martinspire]

I'm already using Angular Standalone and as far as I know Mockbuilder is more for non-standalone. Plus I'm also using Spectator, which puts some improvements on Testbed, but also doesn't really support mockbuilder in the same way.

I would also be fine with MockComponent(ChildComponent).replace(MockChildComponent) but it just seems logical to me to also be able to use the Mock... functions to replace my components with my own mocks. Often times I'm trying to replace a very complex dependency with a simple mock that just has the functions I'm looking for instead of all of the logic and sub dependencies that this complex dependency offers. Like a Charting library or for displaying maps. Its a lot faster to just create a small mock.

But right now I'm also blocked because of the whole mock child with signal issue, so I wanted to use my own temporary mocks, but found it was tedious to implement it, when I had hoped that NGMocks would have a simpler replacement option.

[satanTime]

You need to read documentation. All things you mentioned are supported by MockBuilder.