Book Image

React and React Native - Fourth Edition

By : Adam Boduch, Roy Derks, Mikhail Sakhniuk
Book Image

React and React Native - Fourth Edition

By: Adam Boduch, Roy Derks, Mikhail Sakhniuk

Overview of this book

Over the years, React and React Native has proven itself among JavaScript developers as a popular choice for a complete and practical guide to the React ecosystem. This fourth edition comes with the latest features, enhancements, and fixes to align with React 18, while also being compatible with React Native. It includes new chapters covering critical features and concepts in modern cross-platform app development with React. From the basics of React to popular components such as Hooks, GraphQL, and NativeBase, this definitive guide will help you become a professional React developer in a step-by-step manner. You'll begin by learning about the essential building blocks of React components. As you advance through the chapters, you'll work with higher-level functionalities in application development and then put your knowledge to work by developing user interface components for the web and native platforms. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn how to bring your application together with robust data architecture. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build React applications for the web and React Native applications for multiple mobile platforms.
Table of Contents (36 chapters)
1
Part 1 – React
15
Part 2 – React Native
31
Part 3 – React Architecture

Cleaning up after components

In this section, you'll learn how to clean up after components. You don't have to explicitly unmount components from the DOM – React handles that for you. There are some things that React doesn't know about and, therefore, cannot clean up for you after the component is removed.

It's for these types of cleanup tasks that the componentWillUnmount() life cycle method exists. One use case for cleaning up after React components is asynchronous code.

For example, imagine a component that issues an API call to fetch some data when the component is first mounted. Now, imagine that this component is removed from the DOM before the API response arrives.

Cleaning up asynchronous calls

If your asynchronous code tries to set the state of a component that has been unmounted, nothing will happen. A warning will be logged, and the state won't be set. It's actually very important that this warning is logged; otherwise, you...