Error not implemented navigation except hash changes

beforeEach(() => {
                window.location.href = `/ms/submission/?mybib`;
                window.location.search = '?mybib';
});

I’m getting this error too

Error: Not implemented: navigation (except hash changes)
    at module.exports (...node_modulesjsdomlibjsdombrowsernot-implemented.js:9:17)
    at navigateFetch (...node_modulesjsdomlibjsdomlivingwindownavigation.js:74:3)

jsdom does not support navigation, so setting window.location.href or similar will give this message. I’m not sure if Jest was just suppressing these messages before, or what.

This is probably something you should fix in your tests, because it means that if you were running those tests in the browser, the test runner would get completely blown away as you navigated the page to a new URL, and you would never see any tests results. In jsdom instead we just output a message to the console, which you can ignore if you want, or you can fix your tests to make them work better in more environments.

Anyway, I’d like to add more documentation on this for people, so I’ll leave this issue open to track doing so.

Totally get what you’re saying. The recent Jest 22 update went from JSDOM 9 to 11 IIRC, so the behavior back in 9.x might have been quite different.

All that aside, I would love to see navigation implemented in JSDOM with some sort of flag to make it a no-op in terms of loading a different page (in similar spirit to HTML5 pushstate.) The library is very commonly used for testing purposes so, while perhaps a quirky request, it would be used often.

I don’t think we should add a flag that makes your tests run different in jsdom than in browsers. Then your stuff could be broken in browsers (e.g. it could be redirecting users to some other page, instead of doing the action that your tests see happening) and you wouldn’t even notice!

Well in this case it wouldn’t doing anything different, other than not unloading the current page context. I’d still expect window.location.href to be updated, etc.

@domenic I’m having the same issue and I was wondering if there is some sort of best practice to setup JSDOM with an app that sets window.location. From what I can tell JSDOM throws an error when trying to set window.location and logs an error when trying to set window.location.href — however I’m reading on mdn that the two should be synonyms. Should I be updating the location in another way thats easier to stub?
Thankful for help 😅

Allow me to post the answer to my own question 😁
I simply replace the usages of window.location = url; and window.location.href = url; with

window.location.assign(url);

and then in my tests I did:

sinon.stub(window.location, 'assign');
expect(window.location.assign).to.have.been.calledWith(url);

Works like a charm — hope it can be of help to someone else 👍

Agree this should work out of the box. We mock window.location at FB, but that conflicts with jsdom’s History implementation.

As a small team, we would certainly appreciate help from the larger projects that depend on us to properly implement navigation in jsdom.

If anyone is interested, #1913 could be a good place to start.

Possible solution is to rely on dependency injection/mock for the window object in unit tests.

Something like:

it('can test', () => {
  const mockWindow = {location: {href: null}};
  fn({window: mockWindow});
  expect(mockWindow.href).toEqual('something');
});

This is not ideal but as said by @domenic:

This is probably something you should fix in your tests, because it means that if you were running those tests in the browser, the test runner would get completely blown away as you navigated the page to a new URL

For now we live with this and yes we change our implementation code for tests which is considered bad practice but we also sleep well at night!

Happy testing

@hontas’s solution helped:

I did use window.location.assign(Config.BASE_URL); in my code.

And here’s the test:

jest.spyOn(window.location, 'assign').mockImplementation( l => {
   expect(l).toEqual(Config.BASE_URL);
})

window.location.assign.mockClear();

Same problem, I’m using window.location.search = foo; in my code and I would like to test it using jsdom (and jest) 🤔

PS: Related to facebook/jest#5266

After updating to jsdom 12.2.0 got error:
TypeError: Cannot redefine property: assign
on const assign = sinon.stub(document.location, 'assign')
how to fix it?

@yuri-sakharov

After updating to jsdom 12.2.0 got error:
TypeError: Cannot redefine property: assign
on const assign = sinon.stub(document.location, 'assign')
how to fix it?

sinon.stub(document.location, 'assign')

needs to be:

sinon.stub(window.location, 'assign')

you need to replacedocument with window

I have the following function

export const isLocalHost = () => Boolean(
  window.location.hostname === 'localhost' ||
  // [::1] is the IPv6 localhost address.
  window.location.hostname === '[::1]' ||
  // 127.0.0.1/8 is considered localhost for IPv4.
  window.location.hostname.match(
    /^127(?:.(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)){3}$/
  )
);

for me to be able to test that it works I inject directly the hostname

it('#isLocalHost should return true for all the cases of localhost', () => {
    window.location.hostname = 'localhost';
    expect(isLocalHost()).toBeTruthy();

    window.location.hostname = '[::1]';
    expect(isLocalHost()).toBeTruthy();

    window.location.hostname = '127.0.0.1';
    expect(isLocalHost()).toBeTruthy();

    // Reset back the hostname to avoid issues with it
    window.location.hostname = '';
  });

But I am getting this error.

I don’t expect jsdom to fully implement the navigation but at least add the keys and mock the functions.

I am confused on why I keep getting this error, I just want to be able to setup the value.

@nickhallph
I replaced it to window.location as you wrote but result the same
TypeError: Cannot redefine property: assign
Any ideas?

Same problem as @yuri-sakharov running mocha.

By no means I seem able to replace/update/mock or do anything with window.location.*. The only way I see around this is creating my own custom window.location mock and change the entire codebase to depend on that.

@hontas’s solution helped:

I did use window.location.assign(Config.BASE_URL); in my code.

And here’s the test:

jest.spyOn(window.location, 'assign').mockImplementation( l => {
   expect(l).toEqual(Config.BASE_URL);
})

window.location.assign.mockClear();

@zxiest’s Jest version of @hontas’ solution didn’t work for me, but this did:

window.location.assign = jest.fn();
expect(window.location.assign).toHaveBeenCalledWith('https://correct-uri.com');
window.location.assign.mockRestore();

If you don’t want to change your code to use location.assign — this seems to work with JSDom 11 and 13 (though there’s a chance JSDom might break it in the future…)

delete window.location;
window.location = {}; // or stub/spy etc.

The last answer worked for me, but I had to define replace:

delete window.location
window.location = { replace: jest.fn() }

Hope it helps.

I’m getting TypeError: Cannot redefine property: assign with sinon 7.2.3 and jsdom 13.2.0. No idea why this works for some people and not others?

This is what worked for me:

    global.window = Object.create(window);
    const url = 'http://localhost';
    Object.defineProperty(window, 'location', {
      value: {
        href: url,
      },
      writable: true,
    });

We used pushState to make this to work

 window.history.pushState(
        {},
        '',
        'http://localhost/something/123?order=asc'
      );

This is a difficult situation. JSDOM does not fully supports navigation (other than breadcrumbs) and JSDOM does not allow us to mock-out navigation. The end result is that I can’t write tests which ultimately attempt to trigger navigation.

If JSDOM did learn to navigate (I’m not even sure what that means), maybe I could assert about being on the appropriate page. For my testing use cases, though, asserting the navigation was triggered, rather than actually performed, is much cleaner/faster. It’s what I’ve historically done when testing using jsdom and now it’s broken.

Is anyone else running into the same Error: Not implemented: navigation (except hash changes) during Jest tests that fire a click event on an anchor element with an href? For my tests, I’m spying on a function that gets called onClick and making assertions about that so I need to actually fire the click event on the anchor element.

The solutions above related to mocking window.location work for me where I am explicitly calling window.location.replace or window.location.assign, but don’t help for this case where the navigation originates from an anchor element being clicked.

Any ideas on solutions? Thanks!

How would you test that code in a browser? Keep in mind that in the browser clicking on the link would blow away your whole page and throw away any test results. So whatever you would do to prevent that, will also prevent the much-less-dramatic warning message jsdom outputs to the console.

In my situation project upgraded Jest from 23 to 26 version.
I had a problem with location.search. Had the same error Error: Not implemented: navigation.
Module I tested gets values of search query params.
Next implementation worked for me:

beforeAll(() => {
  delete window.location;
  window.location = new URL('your URL');
})

afterAll(() => {
  window.location.search = '';
})

@mattcphillips have you figured out how to fix this? i’m also having problem when clicking

@Sabrinovsky No, I ended up just adding a script to the setupFiles in my jest config that would swallow the console errors coming from jsdom navigation so that they weren’t cluttering up our tests. More of a bandaid than anything else, but it sounded like these errors are to be expected in our test setup.

Here’s the script that I run before my tests:

// There should be a single listener which simply prints to the
// console. We will wrap that listener in our own listener.
const listeners = window._virtualConsole.listeners('jsdomError');
const originalListener = listeners && listeners[0];

window._virtualConsole.removeAllListeners('jsdomError');

// Add a new listener to swallow JSDOM errors that orginate from clicks on anchor tags.
window._virtualConsole.addListener('jsdomError', error => {
  if (
    error.type !== 'not implemented' &&
    error.message !== 'Not implemented: navigation (except hash changes)' &&
    originalListener
  ) {
    originalListener(error);
  }

  // swallow error
});

This worked for me.

delete global.window.location
global.window.location = { href: 'https://test.com' }

This worked for me

delete window.location
window.location = { assign: jest.fn() }

If you get TypeError: Cannot assign to read only property 'assign' of object '[object Location]', then using something like this in your jest.setup.ts:

global.window = Object.create(window);
Object.defineProperty(window, 'location', {
  value: {
    ...window.location,
  },
  writable: true,
});

If it helps anyone this is what I did. We are using mocha not jest so only have sinon available.

exports.jsdom = new JSDOM('<!doctype html><html><body></body></html>', { url: 'http://localhost' });
const { window } = exports.jsdom;

/* This enables stubbing window.location.assign for url changes */
const { location } = window;
delete window.location;
window.location = { ...location, assign: () => {} };

You can then freely stub…
const assignStub = sandbox.stub(window.location, 'assign');

@Sabrinovsky No, I ended up just adding a script to the setupFiles in my jest config that would swallow the console errors coming from jsdom navigation so that they weren’t cluttering up our tests. More of a bandaid than anything else, but it sounded like these errors are to be expected in our test setup.

Here’s the script that I run before my tests:

// There should be a single listener which simply prints to the
// console. We will wrap that listener in our own listener.
const listeners = window._virtualConsole.listeners('jsdomError');
const originalListener = listeners && listeners[0];

window._virtualConsole.removeAllListeners('jsdomError');

// Add a new listener to swallow JSDOM errors that orginate from clicks on anchor tags.
window._virtualConsole.addListener('jsdomError', error => {
  if (
    error.type !== 'not implemented' &&
    error.message !== 'Not implemented: navigation (except hash changes)' &&
    originalListener
  ) {
    originalListener(error);
  }

  // swallow error
});

This worked for me with angular.
All stub workaround provided in other messages doesn’t work with angular.

Ty @Sabrinovsky

Second attempt at this, my previous attempt broke using the history lib, presumably because assign was no longer a getter.

This solves that issue…

// This makes window.location.assign writable so sinon can stub
function patchLocation(location) {
  const clone = Object.create(Object.getPrototypeOf(location));
  const descriptors = Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptors(location);
  descriptors.assign.writable = true;
  descriptors.assign.configurable = true;
  Object.defineProperties(clone, descriptors);
  return clone;
}

const { location } = window;
delete window.location;
window.location = patchLocation(location);

You can then freely stub…
const assignStub = sandbox.stub(window.location, 'assign');

@Sabrinovsky No, I ended up just adding a script to the setupFiles in my jest config that would swallow the console errors coming from jsdom navigation so that they weren’t cluttering up our tests. More of a bandaid than anything else, but it sounded like these errors are to be expected in our test setup.

Here’s the script that I run before my tests:

// There should be a single listener which simply prints to the
// console. We will wrap that listener in our own listener.
const listeners = window._virtualConsole.listeners('jsdomError');
const originalListener = listeners && listeners[0];

window._virtualConsole.removeAllListeners('jsdomError');

// Add a new listener to swallow JSDOM errors that orginate from clicks on anchor tags.
window._virtualConsole.addListener('jsdomError', error => {
  if (
    error.type !== 'not implemented' &&
    error.message !== 'Not implemented: navigation (except hash changes)' &&
    originalListener
  ) {
    originalListener(error);
  }

  // swallow error
});

Thank you for this!

For anyone who wants to make TypeScript happy

import { VirtualConsole } from 'jsdom';

declare global {
  interface Window {
    _virtualConsole: VirtualConsole;
  }
}

What’s the workaround here if the navigation event is coming from a deeply nested click on an element wrapped in an <a> tag? I’m not able to easily stub the onClick handler to add a e.preventDefault() and I didn’t see and easy way to intercept this error and know if it was an anchor click or location.assign

Solves warnings about navigation not being implemented in JSDOM:
jsdom/jsdom#2112

I can see that there has been a lot of struggle with this from a lot of people.

In my case I had an issue while clicking on html anchor tag element in order to test that analytics are fired correctly. None of the above solutions worked.

In the end it was something very simple…

        clickedLink = getAllByRole('link').find((link) =>
          link.textContent?.includes(getDirectionsText),
        );

        clickedLink.addEventListener(
          'click',
          (event) => event.preventDefault(),
          false,
        );

        userEvent.click(clickedLink);

Attaching a click event listener to the anchor tag before emitting the click event does the trick.

I hope this will help someone else facing the same issue.

For anyone who is interested, here’s how I adapted the @markoboy solution in my Jest test with Vue3:

const button = wrapper.find('#some_id');
button.wrapperElement.addEventListener('click', (event) => event.preventDefault(), false);
button.trigger('click');

Is anyone else running into the same Error: Not implemented: navigation (except hash changes) during Jest tests that fire a click event on an anchor element with an href? For my tests, I’m spying on a function that gets called onClick and making assertions about that so I need to actually fire the click event on the anchor element.

The solutions above related to mocking window.location work for me where I am explicitly calling window.location.replace or window.location.assign, but don’t help for this case where the navigation originates from an anchor element being clicked.

Any ideas on solutions? Thanks!

@mattcphillips

I think this is the issue I just ran into. The response below yours is what triggered a realization for me. I was testing this in the browser by setting a breakpoint on the beforeunload event. So, I just added the same thing in my test and got it to work. Still get the annoying console logs but the test is passing.

However, I will say that I’m a bit confused why the test passes on its own without this kind of event listener, but needs the event listener when run in the same file as other tests. Probably something else I’m missing here that could make my test better…

Anyway, here’s what I tried. Again, this is for an anchor element with an onClick:

window.addEventListener('beforeunload', function () {
  // make your assertion here based on w/e it is your anchor's click handler does
});

// click your anchor after later in your test

How would you test that code in a browser? Keep in mind that in the browser clicking on the link would blow away your whole page and throw away any test results. So whatever you would do to prevent that, will also prevent the much-less-dramatic warning message jsdom outputs to the console.

In all of your replies in this thread, you seem to be completely missing the fact that there are ways to test against the DOM and changes in the location, as is done when testing frameworks like React/Angular/Vue. We are able to fire events which manipulate the DOM, and this is pretty much what’s tested everywhere in these front-end frameworks. We aren’t testing inside of a browser; we’re testing using jest or other test frameworks; we just need to be able to actually stub out these for things like React to be rid of the console.error that is produced by JSDom.

Perhaps you could help users here with some direction on doing this, rather than telling everybody to go fix their «broken code» that wasn’t even written by them. Nothing you’ve said here has been helpful or even really factual at all.

Kinda blows my mind that this issue is still open without conclusion since Jan of 2018.

Frankly, this issue is about the console.error coming out of JSDom, and it’s not about any sort of broken tests. The error just looks like it’s something breaking, but it’s just a console.error.

jsdom is not intended to provide a testing library. We’re providing a browser implementation. If it’s not suitable for your purposes, then you should not use it.

jsdom is not intended to provide a testing library. We’re providing a browser implementation. If it’s not suitable for your purposes, then you should not use it.

Makes much more sense.

Hey guys!

I found a solution without using mock or Object.defineProperty or by creating a. new window etc. …
Here it is :

  afterEach(() => {
      window.history.replaceState({}, "", decodeURIComponent(http://localhost/));
  });

I think the reason for the error we all had is that there’s something wrong going on with the browser history in test env (I’m personally using react-router v6 with ).

Anyway, the code snippet above replaces the current URL with the one passed as the third argument of the .replaceState() function by manipulating not the URL directly, but the history of navigation.

More about this function here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History/replaceState

Hope it was helpful! 🔥