Qwik

Using React In Your Qwik Application

Published Nov 25, 2022

Updated Feb 13, 2023

5 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

Introduction

React, developed by Meta, is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, and it is one of the most used UI JavaScript libraries in the world. React will be turning a decade old by May 2023. It has gained a lot of popularity over the years, and its latest version, React 18, was released in March 2022.

Qwik is a new JavaScript framework by Misko Hevery, creator of Angular, for building frontend browser applications. The major benefit of Qwik is its performance optimization, which features resumability and lazy loading.

As it stands now, there are virtually no Qwik third-party packages or libraries that currently exist, but luckily the Qwik team factored this in, making it easy for developers to easily integrate React libraries or your old React components into your Qwik project without too much difficulty.

In this article, I will show you how to easily integrate React libraries or components into your Qwik project.

Project Set Up

To get started, we need to create a new Qwik app. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal:

npm create qwik@latest

You can also get additional tools and configurations using our starter.dev kit by running the command in your terminal:

npm create @this-dot/starter --kit qwik-graphql-tailwind

You will be prompted to enter the name of your project (let’s call it qwik-react), choose the default option when asked to select a starter, and then install npm dependencies.

Now we have our Qwik application ready to go. Let’s start the development server and see what it looks like;

npm run dev

Now that our app is up and running we will see how we can integrate a React package and component into our Qwik project.

Integrating React in Qwik

Like most JavaScript frontend libraries or frameworks, React makes use of hydration, which has its drawbacks and might be more expensive than you think. Qwik needs no hydration on load. It’s just pure HTML. This makes Qwik qwiker to load UIs, with which users can start interacting. You should keep this in mind when considering to include React components in your Qwik applications.

QwikReact is a tool that allows you to use React components in Qwik, including the whole ecosystem of component libraries such as Material UI, Threejs and React Spring. To get started, we need to run this command inside our Qwik app:

npm run qwik add react

This will install needed dependencies such as qwik-react, react, and react-dom. It will also add emotion and mui, which you can uninstall if you don’t intend to use them.

If we check our project, we should now have some new folders generated. The most important is the src/integrations/react. This is where all our React components will be implemented or React packages will be used.

Qwikify$

The qwikify$ function is exported from @builder.io/qwik-react, which converts React components into Qwik components that you can use across your application, and allows Qwik to implement partial hydration of React components. You cannot use React components in Qwik without converting them first to remove React’s hydration pattern, which is not supported in Qwik, using qwikify$().

Another important thing to remember is to make sure the file containing your React component has this;

/** @jsxImportSource react */

This needs to be imported at the top of the file as this serves as instructions to the compiler to use React as the JSX factory. This means you cannot mix your React components with a Qwik component.

The code above is from the Qwik demo. You can see how the React components are wrapped with the qwikify$() function.

If your React package requires some configuration, don’t try to pass it as a props. Instead, do every configuration right inside the file, ensuring only the dynamic data is passed through.

The code above is from our Qwik GitHub showcase. Check out the full source code here.

So once you are done with Qwikifying your React component, you can now import and use it just as you would normally do a Qwik component.

Let’s run our application, and navigate to the React page at http://localhost:5173/react to view the default Qwik demo;

npm run dev

Interactivity

Qwik tries to reduce or completely remove hydrations, but React heavily depends on it. This means we have to find a way to hydrate our React Component without affecting the concept of Qwik. Qwik allows you to decide when to hydrate your components by using the client: JSX properties. This technique is commonly referred to as “partial hydration”. For more information on this checkout Adding Interactivity on Qwik Docs.

Conclusion

In this article, we saw how to convert React to a Qwik component. We also learned about the dos and don’ts of using React in Qwik, as well as how to handle hydration. I hope you enjoyed this article. Thank you for reading!

If you have any questions or run into any trouble, feel free to join the discussions going on at starter.dev or on our Discord.

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

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About the author(s)

Chinedu Okpala
@allstackDev @allStackDev1

Unit Testing Qwik Components

Unit Testing Qwik Components Qwik is a new, superfast JavaScript framework from builder.io. Created by Miško Hevery, the author of AngularJS, Qwik aims to deliver instant loading web applications of any size or complexity through resumability. This is accomplished partially by delaying the execution and download of JavaScript for as long as possible while providing an excellent developer experience. > "You know React? You know Qwik." > — qwik.builder.io Given Miško's background as the creator of AngularJS, it's interesting that writing Qwik feels very similar to writing React. It even has a React compatibility mode. Personally, I have experience using mostly Angular, but I found that developing with Qwik was very smooth and enjoyable. So, although I am definitely hesitant to jump on new technologies, after attending Miško's workshop, browsing through all the resources at framework.dev tinkering with Qwik, and building a couple of apps with it, I became a fan. However, being a responsible software developer, I then wanted to add unit tests to my Qwik app. And because Qwik is relatively new, I found out there was little documentation on how to do this. Furthermore, until recently, there were no tools to easily set up and interact with Qwik components in unit tests. But that didn't stop me. I explored, asked, and waited for a PR to be merged, and now I am proud to present a comprehensive guide to unit testing Qwik apps. So, without further ado, let's dive into setting up our testing environment. Configuring a Testing Environment There are several options when it comes to choosing a testing framework, and I have even experimented with using Jest, as it is the popular choice for unit testing. However, since Qwik uses Vite, I found that using Vitest was the most straightforward and efficient option. Vitest is specifically designed to be the go-to test runner for Vite projects, which makes it a great fit. If you are familiar with Jest, you will be happy to know that the Vitest API is very similar, so you won't have to learn much to use it effectively. Before moving further to the actual setup, let's make sure you have a Qwik project to test. If you don't yet, you can simply create one by running npm create qwik@latest. Now, let's set up vitest in our Qwik project. It takes 3 easy steps: 1. Install Vitest as a dev dependency by running npm i vitest --save-dev from the root of your project. This will update the devDependencies array in your package.json file. 2. Update your vite.config.ts file to include a test configuration in the defineConfig function. You can start with an empty object for now, but you can always add configuration options later on. Your vite.config.ts should look something like this: ` 3. Update the "scripts" section of your package.json file to include commands for running vitest once, running it in watch mode, and for generating coverage reports. Your "scripts" section should look something like this: ` After completing these steps, you should be able to run npm run test and npm run coverage from your terminal to use Vitest. Note that if you run npm run test and you don't have any tests yet, which is likely the case at this point, you will see the message No test files found, exiting with code 1. Don't worry. We are about to add some tests shortly. Writing Tests By default, vitest will look for files with names that match the pattern '**/*.{test,spec}.{js,mjs,cjs,ts,mts,cts,jsx,tsx}. In a Qwik project that uses TypeScript and returns JSX elements, it makes sense to use the *.spec.tsx or *.test.tsx pattern. I prefer to use the.spec suffix. But .test works just as well, and is equally valid. Feel free to choose the one that you like best. To proceed with writing a unit test, we will need a component to test. For this example, we will use a simple counter component that has a div that displays a number and a button that increments it. To create the component, follow these steps: 1. Go to the src/components directory, and create a new folder called counter. 2. Inside the counter folder, create a new file called counter.tsx and add the following code: ` 3. Next to the counter.tsx file, create a new file called counter.spec.tsx file next to it. This file will contain the unit tests for the Counter component. Now that we have our component and our test file, we can proceed to write our unit tests. Let's open counter.spec.tsx and add some boilerplate along with a simple test to verify we have everything set up correctly: ` We have a describe method that groups related tests together (in our case, we're grouping all the tests we will write for our Counter component), an expect method which is used to make assertions about the values returned by the code being tested, and an it method that defines an individual test. If we now run npm run test, we should see the following output: ` Writing a Simple Test Case Now that we verified that our dummy test work, let's actually test our component's behavior. First, we want to test that it renders correctly, so we will remove our dummy test and leverage the new createDOM method from @builder.io/qwik.testing to render our Counter component inside the test: ` Rerunning the test should result in a pass if we did everything correctly. Now we know our component does render and displays zero as the count. Testing Interactions "Great," you say, "but I want to test the component's logic, not just the initial render!". Well, you're in luck because the createDOM method returns one more property - userEvent - that you can use to interact with the component's DOM. This allows us to simulate user interactions, such as clicking a button, and test whether the component responds correctly. For example, we can test whether our counter correctly increments the count by clicking the button. Here is the updated code example: ` With this additional test, we can be confident that our Counter component not only renders correctly, but also updates the count as expected when the increment button is clicked. Voilà, our component's behavior has been verified! Mocking Qwik Hooks So far, we have a test that verifies the component's logic, which is great! However, there may come a time when we need to mock parts of the component's logic to test certain scenarios. Unfortunately, here comes a little trade-off for the sake of Qwik's quickness. The component$ wrapper does not expose the internals of the component, so we cannot easily modify it for our tests. Fortunately, the most common thing we need to mock in Qwik components are hooks such as useLocation() or useStore(). We can do this by using vi.mock. As we can read in the Vitest docs, the vi.mock method takes two arguments: the path to the module that we want to mock, and a function that returns the mocked module. For example, if we want to modify the initial count in our useStore() hook to be _1_, we can mock the entire @builder.io/qwik module and return the actual module with the modified initial value. We can use the JavaScript bind method to do this. The call to vi.mock can be placed anywhere in the code as it is hoisted and will always be called before modules are imported, but for clarity, we will put it in a beforeAll block: ` Mocking the useLocation hook is even simpler, as it is not expected to change during a test. In this case, we can directly return an object from the mock. Here is an example of how to mock the useLocation hook: ` Conclusion As a newcomer to the world of JavaScript frameworks, Qwik offers a unique approach to building fast, efficient web applications. However, we shouldn't forget about the quality and robustness of our code. In this blog post, we provided a comprehensive guide on how to set up and write tests for your Qwik components. Setting up a testing environment for a Qwik app is relatively straightforward. Qwik uses Vite as its build tool, which means that the most efficient option for unit testing is to use Vitest, a test runner specifically designed for Vite projects. We showed how to install Vitest and update the Vite config file to include a test configuration, and went through examples of how to write tests for Qwik components, including how to mock hooks and test interactions with the DOM. By following the steps and examples in this post, you can easily add unit tests to your Qwik app, and ensure that your components are working correctly. This will give you confidence in your code, and allow you to build more complex and robust applications with Qwik. And if you found this article a bit overwhelming, do not worry, you can check out the Qwik starter kit which includes examples of already implemented tests. Have fun writing Qwik and reliable apps!...

Feb 13, 2023

5 mins

Qwik

How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Introduction Storybook is a great tool for testing and visualizing your components in different states. In this article, we will see how to setup Storybook in a Qwik project. Qwik Qwik is a new JavaScript framework by Misko Hevery, creator of Angular, for building frontend browser applications. The major benefit of Qwik is its performance optimization, and this is achieved through zero loading, resumability, lazy loading, reduced rendering, scalability, and code once. For more information on Qwik, you can check out the docs, github repo, and discord. Project Set Up To get started, we need to create a new Qwik app. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal: ` Initialize Storybook Storybook, unfortunately, doesn’t have a Qwik template yet because it is a new Framework. So the work around is to use the html template . Using the command below, we can initialize Storybook: ` During the initialization, Storybook would ask to automatically install some optional dependencies such as; EslintPlugin and npm7, you can accept or reject it. To accept, type y and hit Enter to progress. Storybook would try to setup a default stories folder, which is based on the ` template we choose, which is `. It is not compatible with the Qwik compiler and will result in compilation errors, so we will have to delete it to avoid running into such errors. Project Structure Our project structure is already setup by Qwik, and Storybook initialization has created a .storybook folder. But we need to make some changes to the Storybook file extension since our project is in TypeScript. This is a snippet of the folders in our project: ` Configuring Storybook Since Qwik runs on Vite, we need to set up the viteFinal function in our main.ts file, which will give us the config that we will use to register our Qwik Vite plugin. Add this line of code in the configuration object: ` In the preview.ts file, this is where we configure how Storybook renders our stories. We need to execute Qwikloader. This will help in registering global browser events, and much more Qwik related benefits. We will replace the content in the file with the code below: ` This solution was found in this discussion: How to do component testing with Qwik?. I believe when the Qwik Storybook type template becomes available these configurations will be there by default. Now we are done with the configuration, let's run storybook and see what we have: ` Creating Stories We can create our first story, we will create a story for our Qwik app component. We will create this story for our default Qwik Header component. I modified the Header component to accept a menus props: ` Conclusion In this article, we saw how to setup Storybook in a Qwik project. We also saw how to create our first story. I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading. If you don't want to do these steps yourself, check out our starter.dev Qwik kit that already has Storybook enabled for your use here. A link to the project repo can be found here. If you have any questions or run into any trouble, feel free to reach out on Twitter....

Dec 12, 2022

3 mins

Qwik

Utilizing Browser Storage to Enhance User Experience in a Qwik Application

Introduction As front-end developers, we are always looking for ways to enhance the user experience of our applications. One of the ways we can achieve this is by utilizing the browser storage to store data, and implement some form of caching. Our web browser has provided us with different storage options to store data such as cookies, localStorage, and indexDB. In this article, we will be looking at how we can use storage to enhance a Qwik application. We are going to also explore hook technology in implementing this. Hooks 🪝 We will be extracting our storage function into a hook function that we can use in any part of our application. What are Hooks? Hooks are JavaScript functions that manage a component’s state and side effects by isolating them. That means we can isolate all the stateful logic into a hook and use it in any component. And just like in ReactJS, Qwik also allows us to create our own custom hooks. Project Set Up To get started, we need to create a new Qwik app. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal: ` You can also get additional tools and configurations using our starter.dev kit by running the command in your terminal: ` After the project is created, we can run the following command to start the development server: ` Now we can open our browser and navigate to http://localhost:5143 to see our app running. The demo app we will be building is a simple form with an input field and a button. The input field will be used to enter a value, and the button will be used to reset the form and the storage state. We will also see how we apply this functionality in our Qwik GitHub showcase app to persist/catch data we fetch from the GitHub API. Storage Hook After the project is created, we can create a new folder in the src folder and name it “hooks”. In the hooks folder, we will create a new file and name it useLocalStorage.ts. In this file, we will create our useLocalStorage hook. ` Let me explain what is happening here: - The useStore hook is used to store the value. We initially set this value to the initial state value passed to our custom hook. - In the useClientEffect$ hook, which runs on the client, we try to update our store value with the value from the localStorage based on the key passed to the hook. If the value is found, we set its parsed value to the store value. If not, we set the store value to the initial state passed to the hook. We also catch any error that might occur, and set the store value to the initial state. - We also have a setValue$ function that is used to set the value of the store and also save it to the localStorage. The setValue$ function is wrapped in a $ function, which is used to create a QRL function- a Qwik optimizer marker function. For more information on QRL, visit the docs. - We also return store and the setValue$ function. This exposes them to be consumed in our components. We don't want to return the value of the store or else it will lose its reactivity. Form Component In the components folder, we will create a new folder called form, which will contain an index file that will export our Form component. The form will be expecting two props; value and setValue, which are from the useLocalStorage hook. ` In our index file, we will import the useLocalStorage hook and the Form component, and our updated index file will look like this: ` We can now see what our simple app looks like in the browser, and we can interact with it. By entering a value in the input field and reloading the page, we can see that the value persists. Next, we want to implement this hook in our Qwik GitHub showcase app to persist the gists data we fetch from the GitHub API and persisting it in the localStorage. We transform our fetch gists logic from this: ` to this; ` So we check if we have cached gists in the Storage. If we do, we set the store data to the cached gists. If not, we fetch the gists from the GitHub API and update the store data with the response. We also pass the setGists function to the updateGists function, which is the setValue$ function from the useLocalStorage hook. This function is used to set the value of the store, and also save it to the localStorage. Conclusion In this article, we were able to understand why we need to improve user experience with a focus on persisting data. We also saw how to create a hook in a Qwik framework, and use our hook to persist data in the localStorage. A link to the project repo can be found here and for our Qwik starter.dev showcase app, here. If you have any questions or run into any trouble, feel free to reach out on Twitter or on our Discord....

Jan 10, 2023

5 mins

Qwik

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

As web developers, we're often working with data from external sources like APIs we don't control or user inputs submitted to our backends. We can't always rely on this data to take the form we expect, and we can encounter unexpected errors when it deviates from expectations. But with the Zod library, we can define what our data ought to look like and parse the incoming data against those defined schemas. This lets us work with that data confidently, or to quickly throw an error when it isn't correct. Why use Zod? TypeScript is great for letting us define the shape of our data in our code. It helps us write more correct code the first time around by warning us if we are doing something we shouldn't. But TypeScript can't do everything for us. For example, we can define a variable as a string or a number, but we can't say "a string that starts with user_id_ and is 20 characters long" or "an integer between 1 and 5". There are limits to how much TypeScript can narrow down our data for us. Also, TypeScript is a tool for us developers. When we compile our code, our types are not available to the vanilla JavaScript. JavaScript can't validate that the data we actually use in our code matches what we thought we'd get when we wrote our TypeScript types unless you're willing to manually write code to perform those checks. This is where we can reach for a tool like Zod. With Zod, we can write data schemas. These schemas, in the simplest scenarios, look very much like TypeScript types. But we can do more with Zod than we can with TypeScript alone. Zod schemas let us create additional rules for data parsing and validation. A 20-character string that starts with user_id_? It's z.string().startsWith('user_id_').length(20). An integer between 1 and 5 inclusive? It's z.number().int().gte(1).lte(5). Zod's primitives give us many extra functions to be more specific about *exactly* what data we expect. Unlike TypeScript, Zod schemas aren't removed on compilation to JavaScript—we still have access to them! If our app receives some data, we can verify that it matches the expected shape by passing it to your Zod schema's parse function. You'll either get back your data in exactly the shape you defined in your schema, or Zod will give you an error to tell you what was wrong. Zod schemas aren't a replacement for TypeScript; rather, they are an excellent complement. Once we've defined our Zod schema, it's simple to derive a TypeScript type from it and to use that type as we normally would. But when we really need to be sure our data conforms to the schema, we can always parse the data with our schema for that extra confidence. Defining Data Schemas Zod schemas are the variables that define our expectations for the shape of our data, validate those expectations, and transform the data if necessary to match our desired shape. It's easy to start with simple schemas, and to add complexity as required. Zod provides different functions that represent data structures and related validation options, which can be combined to create larger schemas. In many cases, you'll probably be building a schema for a data object with properties of some primitive type. For example, here's a schema that would validate a JavaScript object representing an order for a pizza: ` Zod provides a number of primitives for defining schemas that line up with JavaScript primitives: string, number, bigint, boolean, date, symbol, undefined, and null. It also includes primitives void, any, unknown, and never for additional typing information. In addition to basic primitives, Zod can define object, array, and other native data structure schemas, as well as schemas for data structures not natively part of JavaScript like tuple and enum. The documentation contains considerable detail on the available data structures and how to use them. Parsing and Validating Data with Schemas With Zod schemas, you're not only telling your program what data should look like; you're also creating the tools to easily verify that the incoming data matches the schema definitions. This is where Zod really shines, as it greatly simplifies the process of validating data like user inputs or third party API responses. Let's say you're writing a website form to register new users. At a minimum, you'll need to make sure the new user's email address is a valid email address. For a password, we'll ask for something at least 8 characters long and including one letter, one number, and one special character. (Yes, this is not really the best way to write strong passwords; but for the sake of showing off how Zod works, we're going with it.) We'll also ask the user to confirm their password by typing it twice. First, let's create a Zod schema to model these inputs: ` So far, this schema is pretty basic. It's only making sure that whatever the user types as an email is an email, and it's checking that the password is at least 8 characters long. But it is *not* checking if password and confirmPassword match, nor checking for the complexity requirements. Let's enhance our schema to fix that! ` By adding refine with a custom validation function, we have been able to verify that the passwords match. If they don't, parsing will give us an error to let us know that the data was invalid. We can also chain refine functions to add checks for our password complexity rules: ` Here we've chained multiple refine functions. You could alternatively use superRefine, which gives you even more fine grained control. Now that we've built out our schema and added refinements for extra validation, we can parse some user inputs. Let's see two test cases: one that's bound to fail, and one that will succeed. ` There are two main ways we can use our schema to validate our data: parse and safeParse. The main difference is that parse will throw an error if validation fails, while safeParse will return an object with a success property of either true or false, and either a data property with your parsed data or an error property with the details of a ZodError explaining why the parsing failed. In the case of our example data, userInput2 will parse just fine and return the data for you to use. But userInput1 will create a ZodError listing all of the ways it has failed validation. ` ` We can use these error messages to communicate to the user how they need to fix their form inputs if validation fails. Each error in the list describes the validation failure and gives us a human readable message to go with it. You'll notice that the validation errors for checking for a valid email and for checking password length have a lot of details, but we've got three items at the end of the error list that don't really tell us anything useful: just a custom error of Invalid input. The first is from our refine checking if the passwords match, and the second two are from our refine functions checking for password complexity (numbers and special characters). Let's modify our refine functions so that these errors are useful! We'll add our own error parameters to customize the message we get back and the path to the data that failed validation. ` Now, our error messages from failures in refine are informative! You can figure out which form fields aren't validating from the path, and then display the messages next to form fields to let the user know how to remedy the error. ` By giving our refine checks a custom path and message, we can make better use of the returned errors. In this case, we can highlight specific problem form fields for the user and give them the message about what is wrong. Integrating with TypeScript Integrating Zod with TypeScript is very easy. Using z.infer<typeof YourSchema> will allow you to avoid writing extra TypeScript types that merely reflect the intent of your Zod schemas. You can create a type from any Zod schema like so: ` Using a TypeScript type derived from a Zod schema does *not* give you any extra level of data validation at the type level beyond what TypeScript is capable of. If you create a type from z.string.min(3).max(20), the TypeScript type will still just be string. And when compiled to JavaScript, even that will be gone! That's why you still need to use parse/safeParse on incoming data to validate it before proceeding as if it really does match your requirements. A common pattern with inferring types from Zod schemas is to use the same name for both. Because the schema is a variable, there's no name conflict if the type uses the same name. However, I find that this can lead to confusing situations when trying to import one or the other—my personal preference is to name the Zod schema with Schema at the end to make it clear which is which. Conclusion Zod is an excellent tool for easily and confidently asserting that the data you're working with is exactly the sort of data you were expecting. It gives us the ability to assert at runtime that we've got what we wanted, and allows us to then craft strategies to handle what happens if that data is wrong. Combined with the ability to infer TypeScript types from Zod schemas, it lets us write and run more reliable code with greater confidence....

Nov 15, 2024

7 mins

JavaScriptZod

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Using React In Your Qwik Application

Introduction

Project Set Up

Integrating React in Qwik

Qwikify$

Interactivity

Conclusion

Chinedu Okpala

You might also like

Unit Testing Qwik Components

How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Utilizing Browser Storage to Enhance User Experience in a Qwik Application

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

Unit Testing Qwik Components

How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Utilizing Browser Storage to Enhance User Experience in a Qwik Application

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation