- Use React Children to compose multiple components together
- Access the
children
prop to return a child component
In HTML, encapsulating several bits of UI can be as easy as wrapping them in a single element. For example:
<div class="container">
<h1>Hello, I'm in a container!</h1>
<p>I'm a description!</p>
</div>
In the above code, the h1
and p
tags are direct children of the div
,
meaning that they are rendered within div
. In other words, they are part
of the div
.
In React, you might create a reusable version of this HTML by doing the following:
function Header(props) {
return (
<div class="container">
<h1>{props.header}</h1>
<p>{props.description}</p>
</div>
);
}
The header
and description
props help us make the Header component reusable,
as seen here:
ReactDOM.render(
<div>
<Header header="Hello, I'm in a container!", description="I'm a description!" />
<Header header="I'm another container", description="Whoa that's weird!" />
<Header header="A third container!", description="Cray cray" />
</div>,
document.getElementById('root')
)
This is great when we want UI that has the same structure with different text/attributes. We can even use conditional rendering to help us choose when to render parts of the UI. Not bad! But consider the following HTML:
<div class="container">
<h1>Hello, I'm in a container!</h1>
<p>I'm a description!</p>
</div>
<div class="container">
<strong>Image description</strong>
<div class="image-wrapper"/>
<img src="img/src" alt="text"/>
</div>
</div>
<div class="container">
<h4>People</h4>
<ul>
<li>Evans "Wangtron" Wang</li>
<li>Andrew "Chrome Boi" Cohn </li>
<li>Tashawn "Thursdays" Williams</li>
<li>Alex "Friggin'" Griffith</li>
</ul>
</div>
In this example, we have 3 div
s each with the same class name, but entirely
different children and internal structure. props
won't help us here: each
div
has such radically different content. From what we know of React, we would
be forced to write 3 different components, each with the same wrapping div
but
entirely different contents. Wouldn't it be nice if you could write one
component that can keep much of the same external structure but render
different components internally? Enter the children
prop.
So far you've seen components rendered like this using the self-closing tag syntax:
function Example(props) {
return <div>{props.exampleProp}</div>;
}
<Example exampleProp="example value" />;
However, React also allows you to use your components with an opening and closing tag, like most HTML elements:
<Example exampleProp="example value">
<h1>Example header!</h1>
<p>Some example text</p>
</Example>
If you were to use the above definition of the Example
component, you would
observe no difference at all: the h1
and p
would not be rendered. However,
if you inspect the props in Example
, you'll notice a new prop has been added:
children
.
A closer look at this prop reveals that it contains an array, and that each
element of the array is a component! In this case, you'll see an h1
and a p
tag, in that order. Rendering these children is the same as rendering any array
of components:
function Example(props) {
return (
<div>
{props.exampleProp}
{/* using the children prop to render any elements inside the opening and closing tag of Example */}
{props.children}
</div>
);
}
And voila! You have a component that is able to render its children! Any valid JSX elements, including your own components and nested JSX elements, can be used as children.
To run our example, run npm install && npm start
.
You'll notice that our App
component renders two Container
components, each
with distinct children. Take a look at the code for Container
: spend some time
figuring out what each prop does. (Note: we're using default values for our
destructured props in case values are not passed in
by the parent component.) You'll notice there are 5 props: direction
,
header
, textPosition
, contentPosition
, and children
. We've already
discussed children
, but try to figure out what the others do!
Using React Children greatly expands your ability to make reusable components. While you won't see as many examples of this style of writing components when you're first getting started with React, this pattern is an incredibly useful one to master. In addition to helping with component reusability, it can also help with passing props down multiple levels of the component hierarchy.