You can see the hook takes a few simple parameters, including the familiar pairing of a callback function and a delay in milliseconds. This follows the shape of JavaScript's setTimeout and setInterval methods.

import { useEffect, useState } from 'react';

enum FakeAsyncState {
  PENDING = 'PENDING',
  COMPLETE = 'COMPLETE',
  ERROR = 'ERROR',
}

export const useFakeAsync: Function = (
  callback: Function,
  delay: number = 3000,
  shouldError: boolean = false,
  chaos: boolean = false
) => {
  const [state, setState] = useState<FakeAsyncState>(FakeAsyncState.PENDING);

  useEffect(() => {
    let timer: NodeJS.Timeout;
    const fail = chaos ? Math.random() <= 0.5 : shouldError;
    if (fail) {
      timer = setTimeout(() => {
        setState(FakeAsyncState.COMPLETE);
        callback();
      }, delay);
    } else {
      setState(FakeAsyncState.ERROR);
    }
    return () => clearTimeout(timer);
  }, [delay, callback, chaos, shouldError]);

  return [state];
};

The hook also takes a 'shouldError' parameter so that an error condition can be forced.

The fourth parameter is a little more interesting, 'chaos'. I added this to randomise a success or error condition.

The state returned by the hook mimics a promise, it can either be pending, complete or in an error condition.

Hopefully this will help testing behaviour across components, and avoiding those inevitable bugs that creep in when integrating a UI with an API, like stutters between loading and success states, for example.

That's all! Go checkout the code on GitHub or install my handy hooks library from npm

This post was for day 1 of my #100DaysOfCode challenge. Follow me on Twitter for more.