Book Image

Mastering React Test-Driven Development - Second Edition

By : Daniel Irvine
Book Image

Mastering React Test-Driven Development - Second Edition

By: Daniel Irvine

Overview of this book

Test-driven development (TDD) is a programming workflow that helps you build your apps by specifying behavior as automated tests. The TDD workflow future-proofs apps so that they can be modified without fear of breaking existing functionality. Another benefit of TDD is that it helps software development teams communicate their intentions more clearly, by way of test specifications. This book teaches you how to apply TDD when building React apps. You’ll create a sample app using the same React libraries and tools that professional React developers use, such as Jest, React Router, Redux, Relay (GraphQL), Cucumber, and Puppeteer. The TDD workflow is supported by various testing techniques and patterns, which are useful even if you’re not following the TDD process. This book covers these techniques by walking you through the creation of a component test framework. You’ll learn automated testing theory which will help you work with any of the test libraries that are in standard usage today, such as React Testing Library. This second edition has been revised with a stronger focus on concise code examples and has been fully updated for React 18. By the end of this TDD book, you’ll be able to use React, Redux, and GraphQL to develop robust web apps.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Exploring the TDD Workflow
10
Part 2 – Building Application Features
16
Part 3 – Interactivity
20
Part 4 – Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber

Test-Driving React Router

React Router is a popular library of components that integrate with the browser’s own navigation system. It manipulates the browser’s address bar so that changes in your UI appear as page transitions. To the user, it seems like they are navigating between separate pages. In reality, they remain on the same page and avoid an expensive page reload.

In this chapter, we’ll refactor our example appointments system to make use of React Router. Unlike the rest of the book, this chapter is not a walkthrough. That’s because the refactoring process is quite long and laborious. Instead, we’ll look at each of the main changes in turn.

This chapter covers the following:

  • Designing React Router applications from a test-first perspective
  • Testing components within a router
  • Testing router links
  • Testing programmatic navigation

By the end of the chapter, you’ll have learned all the necessary techniques...