Book Image

React Components

By : Christopher Pitt
Book Image

React Components

By: Christopher Pitt

Overview of this book

The reader will learn how to use React and its component-based architecture in order to develop modern user interfaces. A new holistic way of thinking about UI development will establish throughout this book and the reader will discover the power of React components with many examples. After reading the book and following the example application, the reader has built a small to a mid-size application with React using a component based UI architecture. The book will take the reader through a journey to discover the benefits of component-based user interfaces over the classical MVC architecture. Throughout the book, the reader will develop a wide range of components and then bring them together to build a component-based UI. By the end of this book, readers would have learned several techniques to build powerful components and how the component-based development is beneficial over regular web development.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
React Components
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Validating properties


Before we look at storing data, there is another habit I'd like to share with you. The components we created in the last chapter work well together, but our aim is to make each component self-contained. We want others to be able to reuse our components, but they will encounter problems if they don't know which properties our components expect.

Consider what would happen if we used PageAdmin like this:

ReactDOM.render(
    <PageAdmin backend="ajax" />,
    document.querySelector(".react")
);

Faced with this component, and no documentation, it might be tempting to substitute a Backend object with some other configuration data. This looks reasonable to someone unfamiliar with the component. And, without a careful study of all our components, we can't expect others to know what those properties should be.

We can protect against this situation by adding property validation. Let's add some validation to PageEd itor:

PageEditor.propTypes = {
    "id": React.PropTypes.number...