React Testing Library: Checkboxes and events
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TL;DR
If you're testing a checkbox input element with React Testing Library, you'll
want to fire a click
event on the checkbox not a change
event!
Read on to find out how I discovered this!
I was recently refactoring about 70 individual Enzyme-based unit tests across our design system codebase at work to swap it for React Testing Library, and encountered an odd quirk that I figured I'd document on my blog.
I was converting some tests for one of our Checkbox Table components, a component that allows users to select individual rows or the entire page of results shown within a table. The previous tests were quite extensive, the entire file was well over 1200 lines of code covering many different and difficult edge cases.
As I went through I converted one of the tests that was asserting on an
onChange
handler being properly called when one of the checkboxes was
selected, the previous test code looked something like:
const handleChange = jest.fn();
const wrapper = mount(<CheckboxTable onChange={handleChange} />);
wrapper
.find(`[data-enzyme-id="header-checkbox"]`)
.simulate('change', { target: { checked: true } });
expect(handleChange).toHaveBeenCalledTimes(1);
So I started converting as I had other tests within the codebase:
const handleChange = jest.fn();
render(<CheckboxTable onChange={handleChange} />);
fireEvent.change(screen.getByTestId('header-checkbox'), {
target: { checked: true },
});
expect(handleChange).toHaveBeenCalledTimes(1);
However, the test started failing!
I started scratching my head after debugging this for about 30 minutes without
making much traction on the failing test, in fact I was about to comment the
test out and return to it in a follow up ticket but then I did one last google
search and stumbled upon
this stackoverflow result,
linked from there was this issue comment noting that for checkbox elements, we
actually want to fire a click
event instead of a change
event!
So I went back to my test and updated it one last time to the following:
const handleChange = jest.fn();
render(<CheckboxTable onChange={handleChange} />);
fireEvent.click(screen.getByTestId('header-checkbox'));
expect(handleChange).toHaveBeenCalledTimes(1);
and the test started passing!
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