Testing

This page describes how to test an application built with React Aria. It documents the available testing utilities available for each aria pattern and how they can be used to simulate common user interactions.

Testing semantics

The recommended way to query for React Aria Components and their internals is by semantics. React Aria Components implement ARIA patterns. ARIA is a W3C standard that specifies the semantics for many UI components. Unlike the DOM structure of the component, these semantics are much less likely to change over time, making them ideal to query for.

The main attribute to look for when querying is the role. This attribute represents the type of element a DOM node represents, e.g. a button, list option, or tab.

React Testing Library

React Testing Library is useful because it enforces that you write tests using semantics instead of implementation details. We use React Testing Library to test React Aria itself, and it's quite easy to query elements by role, text, label, etc.

import {render} from '@testing-library/react';

let tree = render(<MyComponent />);
let option = tree.getByRole('button');

Test ids

Querying by semantics covers many scenarios, but what if you have many buttons on a page or its text changes due to translations based on locale? In these cases, you may need a way to identify specific elements in tests, and that's where test ids come in.

React Aria Components pass all data attributes through to their underlying DOM nodes, which allows you to use an attribute like data-testid to identify a particular instance of a component.

import {render} from '@testing-library/react';
import {Input, Label, TextField} from 'react-aria-components';

function LoginForm() {
  return (
    <>
      <TextField data-testid="username">
        <Label>Username</Label>
        <Input />
      </TextField>
      <TextField data-testid="password">
        <Label>Username</Label>
        <Input />
      </TextField>
    </>
  );
}

let tree = render(<LoginForm />);
let username = tree.getByTestId('username');
let password = tree.getByTestId('password');

Triggering events

React Aria Components rely on many different browser events to support different devices and platforms, so it's important to simulate these correctly in your tests. For example, a click is really a mousemove and mouseover the target, followed by mousedown, focus, and mouseup events, and finally a click event.

The best way to handle this is with the user-event library. This lets you trigger high level interactions like a user would, and the library handles firing all of the individual events that make up that interaction.

import {render} from '@testing-library/react';
import userEvent from '@testing-library/user-event';

let tree = render(<LoginForm />);

// Click on the username field to focus it, and enter the value.
userEvent.click(tree.getByLabelText('Username'));
userEvent.type(document.activeElement, 'devon');

// Tab to the password field, and enter the value.
userEvent.tab();
userEvent.type(document.activeElement, 'Pas$w0rd');

// Tab to the submit button and click it.
userEvent.tab();
userEvent.click(document.activeElement);

React Aria test utils

TODO can't place this next to the header here

@react-aria/test-utils is a set of testing utilities that aims to make writing unit tests easier for consumers of React Aria or for users who have built their own components following the respective ARIA pattern specification.

Installation

yarn add @react-aria/test-utils --dev

Setup

Once installed, you can access the User that @react-aria/test-utils provides in your test file as shown below. This user only needs to be initialized once and then can be used to generate specific ARIA pattern tester in your test cases. This gives you access to that pattern's specific utilities that you can then call within your test to query for specific subcomponents or simulate common interactions. See below for what patterns are currently supported.

// YourTest.test.ts
import {screen} from '@testing-library/react';
import {User} from '@react-aria/test-utils';

// Provide whatever method of advancing timers you use in your test, this example assumes Jest with fake timers.
// 'interactionType' specifies what mode of interaction should be simulated by the tester
// 'advanceTimer' is used by the tester to advance the timers in the tests for specific interactions (e.g. long press)
let testUtilUser = new User({interactionType: 'mouse', advanceTimer: jest.advanceTimersByTime});
// ...

it('my test case', async function () {
  // Render your test component/app
  render();
  // Initialize the table tester via providing the 'Table' pattern name and the root element of said table
  let table = testUtilUser.createTester('Table', {root: screen.getByTestId('test_table')});

  // ...
});

See below for the full definition of the User object.

Patterns

// Combobox.test.ts
import {render} from '@testing-library/react';
import {User} from '@react-aria/test-utils';

let testUtilUser = new User({interactionType: 'mouse'});
// ...

it('ComboBox can select an option via keyboard', async function () {
  // Render your test component/app and initialize the combobox tester
  let {getByTestId} = render(
    <ComboBox data-testid="test-combobox">
      ...
    </ComboBox>
  );
  let comboboxTester = testUtilUser.createTester('ComboBox', {root: getByTestId('test-combobox'), interactionType: 'keyboard'});

  await comboboxTester.open();
  expect(comboboxTester.listbox).toBeInTheDocument();

  let options = comboboxTester.options();
  await comboboxTester.selectOption({option: options[0]});
  expect(comboboxTester.combobox.value).toBe('One');
  expect(comboboxTester.listbox).not.toBeInTheDocument();
});