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

Form Validation

For many programmers, TDD makes sense when it involves toy programs that they learn in a training environment. But they find it hard to join the dots when they are faced with the complexity of real-world programs. The purpose of this part of this book is for you to apply the techniques you’ve learned to real-world applications.

This chapter takes a somewhat self-indulgent journey into form validation. Normally, with React, you’d reach for a ready-made form library that handles validation for you. But in this chapter, we’ll hand-craft our own validation logic, as an example of how real-world complexity can be conquered with TDD.

You will uncover an important architectural principle when dealing with frameworks such as React: take every opportunity to move logic out of framework-controlled components and into plain JavaScript objects.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Performing client-side validation
  • Handling...