FAQ: React Testing Library - Mimicking User Interactions

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This community-built FAQ covers the “Mimicking User Interactions” exercise from the lesson “React Testing Library”.

Paths and Courses
This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

(Beta) Learn React Testing

FAQs on the exercise Mimicking User Interactions

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2

In both the code example and the exercise of this lesson, we grab the input with the getByRole method and pass it the string ‘textbox’, but I can’t see where we use that textbox word anywhere in the JSX.

import React from 'react';
import { render, screen } from '@testing-library/react';
import userEvent from '@testing-library/user-event';
import '@testing-library/jest-dom';
 
const GreetingForm = () => {
  return(
    <form>
      <label htmlFor="greeting">
        Greeting:
      </label>
      <input type="text" id="greeting" />
      <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
    </form>
  );
};
 
test('should show text content as Hey Mack!', () => {
  // Render the component to test
  render(<GreetingForm />);
  // Extract the textbox component
  const textbox = screen.getByRole('textbox');
  // Simulate typing 'Hey Mack!'
  userEvent.type(textbox, 'Hey Mack!');
  // Assert textbox has text content 'Hey Mack!'

Also the docs suggest we use the label name to grab the input element.

Can someone explain how come the code works like this? Is the input element by default considered to have a role of textbox as an arbitrary name? Why don’t we just use ‘input’ instead in the getByRole method or grab by the label if we need to be more specific?

3

Yeah the lesson skips over why ‘textbox’ was used but the reason is that input elements with a type of ‘text’ have a role of 'textbox.
Other input types have different roles. An input with a type of ‘checkbox’ would have a role of ‘checkbox’ so it’s the same in this case.

1 Like