React Component Best Practices for Beginners
Tags: react, flatiron, webdev, jsx
Published: 2023-07-02 12:22:36

React is a powerful library for building user interfaces, and it's important to follow best practices to keep your code managed and maintained. Let's discuss some best practices for React component composition to keep your code clean when it grows in complexity.

- Single Responsibility Principle: 
Each component should have a single responsibility. This means that a component should focus on doing one thing well. If a component begins to handle too many tasks, it becomes harder to read, understand, and maintain. By keeping your components small and focused, you can easily reuse them throughout your application.

- Separate stateful aspects from rendering:
Stateful components store information about the component's state and provide context to other parts of the UI. They have no memory and receive props from parent components. I recommend to keep your stateful data-loading logic separate from your rendering stateless logic. Use one stateful component to load data and another stateless component to display that data. This will reduce the complexity of the components and makes them more scalable and reusable.

```Javascript
   // Stateful component
   import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

   const DataLoadingComponent = () => {
     const [data, setData] = useState(null);

     useEffect(() => {
       // Fetch data and update state
       fetchData().then((response) => setData(response));
     }, []);

     return (
       <div>
         {data ? <DisplayComponent data={data} /> : <LoadingSpinner />}
       </div>
     );
   };

   // Stateless component
   const DisplayComponent = ({ data }) => {
     return <div>{/* Display data */}</div>;
   };
```

- Use composition instead of inheritance:
React has a powerful composition model that allows you to reuse code between components. Instead of creating component inheritance hierarchies, use props and composition to customize a component's look and behavior. Extract non-UI functionality into separate JavaScript modules and import them into components. This approach promotes code reusability and helps avoid the limitations of inheritance.

```Javascript
   import React from 'react';

   const Button = ({ onClick, children }) => {
     return <button onClick={onClick}>{children}</button>;
   };

   const App = () => {
     const handleClick = () => {
       console.log('Button clicked');
     };

     return <Button onClick={handleClick}>Click me</Button>;
   };
```

- Maintain a structured import order:
When importing external and internal dependencies in your React components, it's important to maintain a structured import order.
Group related imports together and separate them with empty lines for better readability. Start with imports from React and third-party packages, followed by imports from your project's internal modules. Alphabetize the imports within each group to make it easier to find and manage imports. This practice helps keep your import statements organized and prevents too large of files with confusing imports.

```Javascript
 import React from 'react';
   import PropTypes from 'prop-types';
   import { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

   import ComponentA from './ComponentA';
   import ComponentB from './ComponentB';

   // Rest of the component code
```

- Understand the building blocks of React:
Familiarize yourself with the core concepts and building blocks of React, such as hooks, component lifecycles, global state management, and component patterns. Hooks like useState, useEffect, and useRef are essential for managing state and side effects in functional components. Understanding different component patterns helps you choose the right pattern for your specific use cases.

In conclusion, following these best practices for React component composition will help you write clean, maintainable, and reusable code. By using the single responsibility principle, separating stateful aspects from rendering, using composition instead of inheritance, maintaining a structured import order, and understanding the building blocks of React, you can enhance your React development workflow and build better React apps.