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

Displaying tabular data fetched from an endpoint

In this section, we’ll get the basic form of the table in place, with an initial set of data retrieved from the server when the component is mounted.

The server application programming interface (API) supports GET requests to /customers. There is a searchTerm parameter that takes the string the user is searching for. There is also an after parameter that is used to retrieve the next page of results. The response is an array of customers, as shown here:

[{ id: 123, firstName: "Ashley"}, ... ]

Sending a request to /customers with no parameters will return the first 10 of our customers, in alphabetical order by first name.

This gives us a good place to start. When the component mounts, we’ll perform this basic search and display the results in a table.

Skipping the starting point

If you’re following along using the GitHub repository, be aware that this chapter starts with a barebones CustomerSearch...