Change:
I've created a repo to help illustrate what I'm running into: Basically, developing in pure jsx and using the React.createFactory() are not interchangeable under testing using jest. This makes writing unit tests a little trickier. According to this link: , non-jsx components must be wrapped in a React.createFactory(). But, when testing these components using Jest, I've found that these are not interchangeable within tests that mock sub-modules. I'm guessing that the differences stem from using .bind() within React.createFactory:
updated the aforementioned repo with some possible workarounds. hopefully it saves someone else some time. perhaps the documentation can be expanded with an example.
cc
First of all, thank you for an excellent bug report. Very well structured and easy to test. The bad news is that the various wrappers and undoing of wrappers is very complex. It was difficult to get 0.12 into a form where it was a perfect upgrade path. I guess this is a special case where something broke down. I ended up spending a lot of time on this so I'm inclined to just leave 0.12 as broken. :/ The good news is that this works in the master branch so this will be fixed in 0.13. Would you mind submitting a formal pull request with these unit tests to our tests to ensure that it doesn't break again? The exception is asserting on props on mockComponent. We probably won't support that. is considered legacy at this point. It shouldn't be as important in 0.13, since auto-mocked components works better out-of-the-box. We'll probably encourage shallow testing for this use case.
i'll do my best to get the tests into a PR for your test suite. But, fighting some fires at the moment, so I can't promise a drop date. Thanks for looking into it.
Closing as very outdated.

Discussion:
}); }); <ins> describe('comparing jsx vs .createFactory() vs .createElement()', function() { var Child, mocks; beforeEach(function() { require('mock-modules').dumpCache(); mocks = require('mocks'); React = require('React'); ReactDOM = require('ReactDOM'); ReactTestUtils = require('ReactTestUtils'); var metaData = mocks.getMetadata(React.createClass({ render: function() { return React.createElement('div'); }, })); Child = mocks.generateFromMetadata(metaData); }); describe('when using jsx only', function() { var Parent, instance; beforeEach(function() { Parent = React.createClass({ render: function() { return ( <div> <Child ref="child" foo="foo value">children value</Child> </div> ); }, }); instance = ReactTestUtils.renderIntoDocument(<Parent/>); }); it('should scry children but cannot', function() { var children = ReactTestUtils.scryRenderedComponentsWithType(instance, Child); expect(children.length).toBe(1); }); it('does not maintain refs', function() { expect(instance.refs.child).not.toBeUndefined(); }); it('can capture Child instantiation calls', function() { expect(Child.mock.calls[0][0]).toEqual({ foo: 'foo value', children: 'children value' }); }); }); describe('when using parent that uses .createFactory()', function() { var factory, instance; beforeEach(function() { var childFactory = React.createFactory(Child); var Parent = React.createClass({ render: function() { return React.DOM.div({}, childFactory({ ref: 'child', foo: 'foo value' }, 'children value')); }, }); factory = React.createFactory(Parent); instance = ReactTestUtils.renderIntoDocument(factory()); }); it('can properly scry children', function() { var children = ReactTestUtils.scryRenderedComponentsWithType(instance, Child); expect(children.length).toBe(1); }); it('does not maintain refs', function() { expect(instance.refs.child).not.toBeUndefined(); }); it('can capture Child instantiation calls', function() { expect(Child.mock.calls[0][0]).toEqual({ foo: 'foo value', children: 'children value' }); }); }); describe('when using parent that uses .createElement()', function() { var factory, instance; beforeEach(function() { var Parent = React.createClass({ render: function() { return React.DOM.div({}, React.createElement(Child, { ref: 'child', foo: 'foo value' }, 'children value')); }, }); factory = React.createFactory(Parent); instance = ReactTestUtils.renderIntoDocument(factory()); }); it('should scry children but cannot', function() { var children = ReactTestUtils.scryRenderedComponentsWithType(instance, Child); expect(children.length).toBe(1); }); it('does not maintain refs', function() { expect(instance.refs.child).not.toBeUndefined(); }); it('can capture Child instantiation calls', function() { expect(Child.mock.calls[0][0]).toEqual({ foo: 'foo value', children: 'children value' }); }); }); }); </ins>