testing-library-docs VS react-ui-boilerplate

18.react-testing-library

Jest has long been my favorite got to test runner when it comes to UI unit and integration testing. With tools like React Testing Library (Testing Library framework for React) you get the benefit of very easy to write and maintain tests, as well as a quick and efficient way to run our tests.

I'm writing an intergration test with Testing Library where I'm on a boards dashboard area and a user can click a button to create an item on the board. I'm using an intercepting route to do show the popup form. Once finished the user goes back to their area and should see the created board.

This article uses Jest and React Testing Library. It's okay if you want to use other libraries, the fundamentals in this article will help you there as well.

This is the idea behind Testing-Library from what I understand.

https://testing-library.com/

The Testing Library: The Testing Library offers guidance on best practices for testing user interfaces effectively, with a focus on user-centric testing.

There are great tools like Testing Library that render a single component in a single state and then programmatically inspect the resulting DOM. However, the salient details of the rendered HTML – like color, layout, and scale – are hard to express. So, the tests end up brittle (over-specified) or insufficient (under-specified).

LiveCodes provides many of the commonly used developer tools. These include Monaco editor (that powers VS Code), Prettier, Emmet, Vim/Emacs modes, Babel, TypeScript, SCSS, Less, PostCSS, Jest and Testing Library, among others. All these tools run seamlessly in the browser without any installations or configurations. It feels like a very light-weight version of your own local development environment including the keyboard shortcuts, IntelliSense and code navigation features.

As I've been writing this series, I realized it's an ode to the magic of Testing Library, which is built for testing UIs as a user would experience an app. This principle means Testing Library is not introduced to your UI until after it has already rendered...which means Testing Library is navigating a DOM just as a user would...and users do not know or care what framework you used to build your UI, just that it works as expected.

And while your unit tests are at least there, they don't seem to do anything useful. You're just testing React.