Mocking navigator.clipboard.writeText in Jest

If you're working on a web application that interacts with the clipboard API, you may need to write tests for functionality that calls navigator.clipboard.writeText. However, mocking this API can be tricky, especially when using Jest in ES6. In this post, I'll walk you through the issues I encountered and how I resolved them.

The first approach I tried was to overwrite the clipboard object directly. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in ES6 because the clipboard object has only a getter, making it read-only. Attempting to assign a new value to clipboard will result in an error.

// This won't work
navigator.clipboard = {
  writeText: jest.fn()
};

The solution is to use jest.spyOn to create a mock implementation of the writeText method. Here's how you can do that:

jest.spyOn(navigator.clipboard, 'writeText');

However, when I tried this approach, I ran into another issue: a DOMException with the message "Type text/plain does not match the blob's type". After some digging, I realized that this error was occurring because the Jest environment doesn't implement the Clipboard API.

To work around this, I had to mock the writeText method using spyOn and make it return a resolved Promise:

const writeTextMock = jest.spyOn(navigator.clipboard, 'writeText').mockResolvedValue();

With this approach, my tests could call navigator.clipboard.writeText without throwing any errors, and I could use the writeTextMock to assert that the method was called with the expected arguments.

describe('MessagePane', () => {
  it('should copy content to clipboard when button is clicked', async () => {
    const messages = [
      { author: 'USER', content: 'Hello' },
      { author: 'BOT', content: 'Hi' },
    ];

    const { user } = renderWithProviders(
      <MessagePane messages={messages} />, {}
    );

    const writeTextMock = jest.spyOn(navigator.clipboard, 'writeText').mockResolvedValue();
    const copyButtons = screen.getAllByRole('button');
    await user.click(copyButtons[1]);

    expect(writeTextMock).toHaveBeenCalledWith('Hi');
  });
});

In summary, mocking the navigator.clipboard.writeText method in Jest requires a few steps:

1. Use jest.spyOn to create a mock implementation of the writeText method.
2. Make the mock implementation return a resolved Promise to avoid DOMException errors.
3. Use the mock instance to assert that the method was called as expected in your tests.

I hope this blog post helps you navigate the intricacies of mocking the Clipboard API in Jest. Happy testing!