

React Best Practices & Tips Every React Developer Should Know Part 1.Ħ.
#REACT CONSTRUCTOR HOW TO#
Learn how to initialize state faster, use key props the right way, deal with asynchronous nature of the setState and how to use propTypes and defaultProps.
#REACT CONSTRUCTOR CODE#
Use these React best practices to make your code better and your work easier and faster. Writing clean React code is hard and it takes time.

Epilogue: React Best Practices & Tips Every React Developer Should Know Pt.2.Never rely on setState always being synchronous Initialize component state without class constructor However, if you have props or state that may change but might not necessarily trigger a re-render, this is where you would add your logic to decide if a re-render should occur. The default behavior is to re-render on every state change, and most of the time you should rely on the default behavior. If you choose to omit this, you then opt in to the default behavior. This function receives two parameters, the next props and the next state. true indicates a re-render needs to occur, false indicates that no re-render is required by the component. If you do decide to include it, however, it simply needs to return true or false. If you don’t need this check, you can omit this method entirely. ShouldComponentUpdate is our next lifecycle method. We won’t dive into that again, so scroll up (or flip backwards) if you need to reference what that method is used for.
#REACT CONSTRUCTOR UPDATE#
When an update happens, getDerivedStateFromProps is triggered once more. The props and state changes are fairly similar, but forceUpdate() circumvents some lifecycle methods. Most notably, when the props to the component change, when the state changes, or when forceUpdate() is called. This is definitely where the lifecycle gets complicated, so buckle up!Īn update can be triggered by a couple of different scenarios. We’ve covered some of the lifecycle methods that also trigger during an update ( render, getDerivedStateFromProps), but there’s a lot we haven’t yet. This will trigger a second render, but the user won’t see the intermediate state. It’s worth mentioning that you can call setState immediately in componentDidMount. Instead, if your component needs to use local state, assign the initial state to this.state directly in the constructor. You should not call setState() in the constructor().

React has changed a lot over the past few years and it’s lifecycle methods are no exceptions. Thankfully, they’re fairly similar to Android’s lifecycle methods and it wasn’t long before I was able to grasp them. React Lifecycle Methods are one tricky piece of business, especially if you’re coming from a framework that doesn’t have their own.
