5 Tips for Using React Table
Tags: webdev, javascript, beginners, tutorial
Published: 2022-12-07 11:19:58

React Table is one of the best libraries I've used over the past few years, and it helped me to greatly improve my websites.
If you're looking to add React Table to your web app, here are five tips to keep in mind:

1. Keep your data organized. React Table relies on having a well-organized data set, so take the time to structure your data correctly.
To do this, you can use React.propTypes, or, even better, TypeScript, to define the exact structure of your data.
This will help you make sure that when you try to access your data using React Table, you will always know where each data is located and how to display it based on how it is structured.

2. Make sure your table is responsive. React Table is designed to be used on mobile devices and it is an Headless library (which means it has no styling out of the box, only functionality), so make sure your table is responsive to ensure a smooth user experience.
To do this, you can use any CSS library (or none) you want!
Just write good CSS that scales based on the display and you're good to go.

3. Use pagination wisely. Pagination can help improve the performance of your table, but use it wisely to avoid overwhelming users with too much data at once.\
Let's say you fetch thousands of records to display on your table. By default, React Table will divide all of this data into pages so it will only have to render a few records at a time, which will significantly improve performance!
But did you know you can also pear this feature with your fetching mechanism to improve performance even further?
That's right. If your API supports fetching data by small amounts each time, you can use the current page's number to only fetch the few records needed for this page.
This will again significantly improve performance and can also help you save a lot of money on cloud computing and database operations!
 

4. Customize the table to your needs. React Table offers a variety of customization options, so take advantage of them to create a table that fits your specific needs.
As I've mentioned before, React Table is an Headless library, which means it comes with only features and no styling.
This gives you full control not only on which features to use like sorting, filtering, pagination and many more, but also on how they will look!
You can very quickly add and remove features, and then style them however you like to fit your site!

5. Test, test, test. As with any web app, it's important to thoroughly test React Table before putting it into production.
While React Table is a great library, nothing is a 100% perfect. Check your data types and structures (see tip 1), check your styling and responsiveness (see tips 2 and 4), and any other thing you can think of.

That's it!
React Table is definitely an amazing library with great features, and I hope my tips will help you get the most out of it :)

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