React Native testID Babel Plugin

What it does:

This plugin transform testID JSX attributes into accessibility properties so that Android can be found on black box end-to-end tooling like Appium.

Why is it needed:

On Android for the application elements to be targetable/found it needs to use the resourceId, we assumed React Native would convert testID to resourceId, unfortunately it didn't. With a quick search, you'll find a few dozens of closed tickets on this subject.

To achieve this we could do the same approach as react-native-testid, but this meant that the developer is responsible to remember to use this tool, plus it means changing the code every where with this change.

Another possibility would be to wrap all React Native components with this converter (testID to accessibility on Android) and make a proxy module with them. This has a similar flaw like the previous idea, the developer must remember to import the React Native components from our custom module.

This solution (current plugin) allow us developers to code as before, completely oblivious of these testID differences between Android and iOS.

Background story:

We used Detox to test our app from an end-to-end perspective. Detox takes the gray box approach, which means the package as to be installed directly onto the app so that it can work.

Besides having some challenges with Detox itself and we preferring the black box approach, the main flaw for us is that Detox (currently) does not support to run tests on real devices. After some investigation we found Appium, and here is where the reason for this plugin pop'ed.

Install

With NPM

$ npm install --save-dev @mloureiro/babel-plugin-react-native-testid

With Yarn

$ yarn add --dev @mloureiro/babel-plugin-react-native-testid

Usage

Add the plugin to your babel configuration

For example in .babelrc or babel.config.json it is:

{
  "plugins": ["@mloureiro/babel-plugin-react-native-testid"]
}

Note: to improve the code use this configuration only for development builds, to improve even more use babel-plugin-remove-test-ids, remember to set the remove plugin to use the attribute testID, check their documentation