Dispatching Actions to a Redux Store to Test a Redux Connected React Component

In this lesson we show how easy it is to dispatch actions that trigger updates for a component. We can also use those actions as a simple way to load data into our redux store before rendering our component. We're relying on our redux stores's dispatch method to do most of the heavy lifting here. You'll also notice that rendering happens synchronously. We don't need to await our store.dispatch() calls unless we're dispatching an async thunk.

It would be ideal if we could trigger the redux actions by interacting with our component, but in this case <CartLink /> doesn't really have any interactive features. It simply re-renders in response to updates to our redux store triggered elsewhere and so that's what we simulate here.

This lesson also demonstrates a pretty big downside of using the app's redux store directly (instead of a copy), which is that we have to clear any changes we made to the store before the next test.