table[mat-table] doesn't allow debugElement.query to find directives inside it

Bug, feature request, or proposal:

Bug: table[mat-table] makes testing hard because it doesn’t have a way for getting debugElements to be queried.

What is the expected behavior?

fixture.debugElement.query(By.css('*')) should find directives inside a mat-table

What is the current behavior?

fixture.debugElement.query(By.css('*')) only finds table[mat-table] as a DebugElement but it can’t find any other debug element that’s a child of the table

What are the steps to reproduce?

https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-testing-template-4n6yno This has 2 describes: 1 with table[mat-table] (normal table) and another with mat-table (flex tables)

What is the use-case or motivation for changing an existing behavior?

Testing is hard otherwise, my work around has been overriding the module, remove the directive, make a fake directive that has @HostBinding('click') click() { capturedInstance = this; } and test with that.

Which versions of Angular, Material, OS, TypeScript, browsers are affected?

6.0.0

Is there anything else we should know?

As implicitly mentioned above, <mat-table> works OK, the problem seems to be on how <table mat-table> renders the rows which seems to be with createEmbeddedView

[marekwalach]

Still not fixed (8.0.0). It blocks any real tests. I have other components inside cell’s and I need test if there are where they should and if they have input values as expected. Can not do it without debugElement.

Any hopes for fixing it? It is 6 months old bug.

[andrewseguin]

I spent some time looking into this and I’ve come out a bit puzzled on why this is happening. There are very few differences between <table mat-table> and <mat-table>, so I suspect it may be related to _applyNativeTableSections as mentioend by @jtxyz. I wish I could spend more time on it to find the root cause, but we’re a tight on resources and have a few higher priority things we need to focus on. It would be extremely helpful in someone in the community could spend some time looking into it.