(Feature Request) Ability to use AOT in unit testing

[Quramy]

Bug Report or Feature Request (mark with an x)

- [ ] bug report -> please search issues before submitting
- [x] feature request

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Repro steps.

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Desired functionality.

At @angular/core/testing v4.2.0, .ngSummary.ts files are introduced to support to use AOT in unit testing ( https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#features-4 ). Do you have a milestone about this?
I think it's useful to run unit testing with something like ng test --aot .

Mention any other details that might be useful.

[pgrm]

If we could run unit tests in AOT than we would have caught the latest bug which was published with 4.4.1 (angular/angular#19219) already on our build server, not just in staging, so this would be super useful.

I read in multiple places, that AOT should become default for angular 5 - is this true? would that resolve this issue afterwards?

[sinedied]

Now that Angular@5 is released, this should be have more priority since we now need the reflect-es7 polyfills just to be able to run the unit tests: AOT can be enabled for serve/build, but not unit tests which is against the "AOT by default" promoted with Angular@5.

Or maybe there is another way to enable AOT for tests (unit/e2e) or workaround for this, @hansl any ideas?

[JBoothUA]

Sorry for asking a question here but this is a blocking issue for us.

Can anyone explain to me how to use relative template urls (aot style) in the source code, and then unit test that same source code with JIT.. i seem to be missing a trick?

or is there another trick to unit test with AOT?

thanks!

[willgm]

Any update on this issue?

[filipesilva]

There is a PR for it (#8007), as as mentioned in #8007 (comment) this support is still experimental and we'll wait until the feature stabilizes before incorporating it into the CLI.

[brian428]

Just a +1 for this. Hopefully the compiler folks determine that AoT support is stable soon. Not only would this catch AoT compile errors, but it should also vastly speed up test runs because all of the components won't need to be re-compiled over and over again for every single spec method.