Book Image

Mastering React Test-Driven Development

By : Daniel Irvine
Book Image

Mastering React Test-Driven Development

By: Daniel Irvine

Overview of this book

Many programmers are aware of TDD but struggle to apply it beyond basic examples. This book teaches how to build complex, real-world applications using Test-Driven Development (TDD). It takes a first principles approach to the TDD process using plain Jest and includes test-driving the integration of libraries including React Router, Redux, and Relay (GraphQL). Readers will practice systematic refactoring while building out their own test framework, gaining a deep understanding of TDD tools and techniques. They will learn how to test-drive features such as client- and server-side form validation, data filtering and searching, navigation and user workflow, undo/redo, animation, LocalStorage access, WebSocket communication, and querying GraphQL endpoints. The book covers refactoring codebases to use the React Router and Redux libraries. via TDD. Redux is explored in depth, with reducers, middleware, sagas, and connected React components. The book also covers acceptance testing using Cucumber and Puppeteer. The book is fully up to date with React 16.9 and has in-depth coverage of hooks and the ‘act’ test helper.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: First Principles of TDD
6
Section 2: Building a Single-Page Application
12
Section 3: Interactivity
16
Section 4: Acceptance Testing with BDD

Test-driving GraphQL

GraphQL offers an alternative mechanism for fetching data, but it's not just a drop-in replacement for the fetch API. In providing a layer of abstraction above HTTP calls, it offers a whole bunch of additional features that can be added to all of your requests with little effort.

The system has a reputation for being advanced or complicated, but, as we'll see in this chapter, it's really nothing harder than the fetch API, particularly if you're following TDD.

We'll use the Relay library to connect to our backend. This is a bare-bones GraphQL implementation that does the job well and without too much magic. If you're using other GraphQL libraries in place of Relay, the techniques we'll explore in this chapter will also apply.

We're going to build a new CustomerHistory component that displays details of a customer, together...