Converting my AngularJS AddressBook app to React

Several months back I spent some time looking at Docker and Docker Compose, and put together a sample AngularJS web app served by Nginx in one container, against a Spring Boot JAX-RS RESTful backend in another container, and using MongoDB in another container.

I wrote a couple of articles (part 1, and part 2) describing the Docker containers and how they were configured together using Docker Compose, but I didn’t spend much time talking about the web app itself. I was intending at the time that I’d develop the frontend app using a number of frameworks as a comparison. The AngularJS AddressBook app is functional (on GitHub here), I got part way converting it to an Angular 2 based app (on GitHub here, although clearly I was unsure at the time thinking Angular 2 was called AngularJS2), but the React app I made a rough start at but didn’t get very far.

Given most recently I’ve been spending some time getting up to speed with some React, I’m going to pick up this app again and complete it, so I’ll have an interesting side by side comparison of the same app developed with all three frameworks. More updates to come.

Adding Jest to an ES5 project (‘Unexpected token’ errors on JSX)

So far I’ve been using Jest with ES6 (see here), but to run Jest tests against React code using ES5, you might get errors when running your test and rendering the JSX.

Per the Jest docs, install the required Jest dependencies:

npm install --save-dev jest babel-jest babel-preset-es2015 babel-preset-react react-test-renderer

If you run ‘npm test’ at this point, any tests matching the *.test.* pattern will get executed, but you’ll probably also see an error ‘Unexpected token’ whenever a render() is called that contains JSX.

The quick fix in this SO question is to add a .babelrc containing this:

{ “presets”: [“es2015”, “react”] }

and then when Jest runs against your React components Babel will know how to transpile your JSX.

More React unit testing with Jest and Enzyme

I’ve been writing some additional tests to get a better idea of how to use Jest and Enzyme for testing my React components (see my first attempts here).

I have a simple Flux app that had a LabelComponent and a ButtonComponent. The full source is here. I want to test the render output is what I expect. The render method on my LabelComponent is pretty simple:

render() {
    return (
        <div className="label">
            Text: { this.state.labelValue.value }
        </div>
    );
}

This component has state which comes from a Store, so this seems a little more interesting to test.

Using Enzyme you can either fully render a component to a virtual DOM using mount() and then check the results, or you can shallow() render which only renders that component and not any additional child dependencies (this is probably more useful for unit tests).

Using mount(), you can check for expected rendered output in the resulting DOM using .contains() – without doing anything to initialize the Store, this is my first step:

import React from 'react';
import {shallow, mount} from 'enzyme';
import LabelComponent from '../components/LabelComponent';
it('renders with text value', () => {

    const result = mount(<LabelComponent/>);
    expect(result.contains(<div className="label">Text: </div>));
});

This is good so far, but I’m really more interested in how the component renders when the Store contains values to be rendered. I’m not sure if I’ve found the right way to do this, but looking for info on how to mock out other parts of my app, like the Store, took me down a rabbit hole. The Jest docs for mocking are not particularly useful. In the api reference there’s something that looks like it allows you to setup a mock return from a function, but it doesn’t have enough info to tell you exactly how to use it.

It seems the Jest api has changed enough over time that it’s hard to find any articles that are current, and show you how the current api should be used. This SO post has a question that’s pretty close to what I was trying to do. There’s two answers that combined together got me to a working solution.

This approach didn’t work for me:

const getData = jest.fn().mockImplementation(() => {
    return {
        getData: jest.fn().mockReturnValue({'labelValue' : { 'value' : 'test'} } )
    }
});

… but, this approach did exactly what I needed:

jest.mock('../stores/LabelStore');
import LabelStore from '../stores/LabelStore';
const getData = jest.fn().mockImplementation(function() {
    return {'labelValue' : { 'value' : 'testvalue'} }
    }
);
LabelStore.getData = getData.bind(LabelStore);

As far as I work out, this is mocking my getData() function to return the mocked data I want for testing, and then binding it to a mocked LabelStore.

I’m not sure if this is the best approach for mocking with Jest, but this is doing exactly what I need. If I learn more about this approach I’ll come back and provide an update later.

Unit testing React components with Jest

Jest is a unit test framework for testing React apps. The Getting Started guide is pretty much all you need to get started. If you’ve created your project using create-react-app then you’re already setup, just run ‘npm test’ and a runner will test up that repeatedly runs your tests as you make code or test changes.

create-react-app also creates a sample test for the sample App.js component. This is a good starting point to follow for other tests:

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import App from './App';

it('renders without crashing', () => {
  const div = document.createElement('div');
  ReactDOM.render(<App/>, div);
});

To test the results of rendering a component, the enzyme library allows you to easily capture the output from a render, and then query the results. For example:

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import {shallow, mount} from 'enzyme';
import Calculator from '../Components/CalculatorComponent';
it('renders with result 3', () => {
    const result = mount(<Calculator value1="1" value2="2" />);
    result.find('button').simulate('click');
    const buttonResult = result.find("#result").first();
    expect(buttonResult.text()).toEqual("3");
});

The CalculatorComponent I’m testing here is the one from my previous React post.