How to make Jest wait for all asynchronous code to finish execution before expecting an assertion

Question

I am writing an integration test for for a React application, i.e. a test that tests many components together, and I want to mock any calls to external services.

The issue is that the test seems to execute before the async callback is executed causing my tests to fail.

Is there anyway around this? Can I somehow wait for call async code to finish?

Here is some bad pseudo code to illustrate my point.

I would like to test that when I mount Parent, its Child component render the content that came back from an external service, which i will mock.

class Parent extends component
{
     render ()
     {
         <div>
            <Child />
         </div>
     }
}
class Child extends component
{
     DoStuff()
     {
         aThingThatReturnsAPromise().then((result) => {
           Store.Result = result
         })
     }

    render()
    {
       DoStuff()
       return(<div>{Store.Result}</div>)


    }
}
function aThingThatReturnsAPromise()
{
     return new Promise(resolve =>{
          eternalService.doSomething(function callback(result) {
               resolve(result)
          }
    }

}

When I do this in my test, it fails because the It gets executed before the callback gets fired.

jest.mock('eternalService', () => {
    return jest.fn(() => {
        return { doSomething: jest.fn((cb) => cb('fakeReturnValue');
    });
});

describe('When rendering Parent', () => {
    var parent;

    beforeAll(() => {
        parent = mount(<Parent />)
    });

    it('should display Child with response of the service', () => {
        expect(parent.html()).toMatch('fakeReturnValue')
    });
});

How do I test this? I understand angular resolves this with zonejs, is there an equivalent approach in React?

Answer 1

Here's a snippet that waits until pending Promises are resolved:

const flushPromises = () => new Promise(setImmediate);

Note that setImmediate is a non-standard feature (and is not expected to become standard). But if it's sufficient for your test environment, should be a good solution. Its description:

This method is used to break up long running operations and run a callback function immediately after the browser has completed other operations such as events and display updates.

Here's roughly how to use it using async/await:

it('is an example using flushPromises', async () => {
    const wrapper = mount(<App/>);
    await flushPromises();
    wrapper.update(); // In my experience, Enzyme didn't always facilitate component updates based on state changes resulting from Promises -- hence this forced re-render

    // make assertions 
});

I used this a lot in this project if you want some working real-world examples.