'select' / 'ng-model' / 'ng-options' behaviour changed in 1.4.9

[almilo]

Dear angular guys,

after upgrading AngularJS from version 1.4.8 to 1.4.9 some unit tests in our project related with basic functionality of the 'select' / 'ng-options' / 'ng-model' directives are broken. When using 1.4.9 with a 'select' tag with 'ng-options' and 'ng-model', the corresponding option does not seem to be selected in the unit test.

Reproducible: always
Browsers: Chrome 45, Firefox 43
Operating system: Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Steps to reproduce:
see plunker http://plnkr.co/edit/wlgE9zrTduqhlG0i8oGT?p=preview (first plunker version - angularjs 1.4.8 OK, last plunker version angularjs 1.4.9 NOK)

[Narretz]

Do I understand correctly that only the test fails, but the select behaves correctly inside the app?

[Narretz]

Ok, so for some reason if the first option is selected, the selected attribute is not set on it. But apart from that, everything seems to work correctly. It was introduced by this change apparently: f7eab8d
There's also seems to be a difference between jqLite and jQuery in this respect: with jQuery, the attribute is not set, with jqLite it's set.

[gkalpak]

This happens because (as an optimization) we check if select.value === option.selectValue (here), before doing "stuff" including setting the selected attribute. Apparently, the 1st option of a <select> gets automatically selected, so select.value will equal 1st option's value the first time this branch is reached. If the selected option that was determined by the ngModel value happens to correspond to the 1st <option> element, we skip the whole if-block (including setting the selected attribute).

[almilo]

@Narretz Yes, it is seems to be only observable through a test which checks the DOM but this can well be because of the explanation from @gkalpak here "the 1st option of a 'select' gets automatically selected".
In my Plunker I am using JQuery instead of jqLite (to use attribute based support)

[almilo]

@gkalpak I changed our test to use the 'select' tag api ('selectedIndex' and 'value') instead of using the 'selected' DOM attribute and seems to work ok, so I guess that is a more reliable way :)

Thanks!!

[gkalpak]

@almilo, I rather think we should fix this in Angular. It's a bug imo.
If you want a temporary work-around for the test, you could do something like this:

  var opt = $('[value="' + selectElement.val() + '"]');
  expect(opt.prop('selected')).toBe(true);
  expect(opt.text()).toBe(...);