Unexpected failing test when mixing promises and useEffect

[AugustinLF]

Describe the bug

I've written a small test case demonstrating issues I've had when combining user event (press) -> promise -> setState -> useEffect. The test case fails for RNTL but passes on @testing-library/react.

test.only('async event with fireEvent', async () => {
  const Comp = ({ onPress }: { onPress: () => void }) => {
    const [state, setState] = React.useState(false);

    React.useEffect(() => {
      console.log('useEffect');
      if (state) {
        console.log('onPress');
        onPress();
      }
    }, [state, onPress]);

    return (
      <Pressable
        onPress={async () => {
          console.log('waiting');
          await Promise.resolve();
          console.log('setting');
          setState(true);
        }}
      >
        <Text>Trigger</Text>
      </Pressable>
    );
  };

  const spy = jest.fn();
  const { getByText } = render(<Comp onPress={spy} />);

  fireEvent.press(getByText('Trigger'));

  await waitFor(() => {
    console.log('checking');
    expect(spy).toHaveBeenCalled();
  });
});

Logs go:

useEffect
waiting
checking
setting
checking
... a bunch of other `checking`
checking
useEffect
onPress

Note that the final onPress call (the one that we're waiting for) happens after the last check.

Expected behavior

It works as expected on web, with those logs

useEffect
waiting
checking
setting
useEffect
onPress
checking

I'll do more investigation to figure out what's happening, but if anyone manage to fix it, feel free to do so :) I kind of expect this issue to be related to a lot of the ones we've had around problems with waitFor, or async act ....

Versions

Latest main, commit of cb46ae2689cc661879e8609766041bf93f1d3137.

[AugustinLF]

Changing the way we handle async update to the way it's handled in the newer versions of @testing-library/react, i.e. dropping the await act and changing the global IS_REACT_ACT_ENVIRONMENT variable works (not changing the global variable still works but leads to some console.error.

https://github.com/testing-library/react-testing-library/pull/1031/files#diff-2ef28f1bd92d5dcd1f2a04d56814d3adaee10cc939b4a7d7c861af3a3cbbccb7R22

I'll need to investigate a bit more on what are the consequences of this change. @mdjastrzebski we officially support react@>16, right? Have we considered running both react@17 and react@18 in the CI?

[mdjastrzebski]

@AugustinLF that's interesting, I will need some more time to understand that RTL approach here. Regarding support we run our test against react@18 (matching RN version). Previously we ran it against previous RN versions, some of which were react@17.

If we want to support many RN version we can duplicate examples/basic with various RN & React version and plug them into proper CI job. Note that example/* tests are run against published RNTL version(s), not local one.

[AugustinLF]

Reading a bit about react@18 this behaviour seems to be mandatory, quoting:

(act) os not designed for tests where you poll until something changes, like end-to-end (e2e) tests, or React Testing Library's waitFor method

reactwg/react-18#102