Book Image

Designing React Hooks the Right Way

By : Fang Jin
Book Image

Designing React Hooks the Right Way

By: Fang Jin

Overview of this book

React hook creates a unique solution for using states in function components to orchestrate UI communication. They provide you with an easy interface to write custom data management solutions with low development and maintenance costs. Understanding how Hooks are designed enables you to use them more effectively, and this book helps you to do just that. This book starts with a custom-crafted solution to reveal why Hooks are needed in the first place. You will learn about the React engine and discover how each built-in Hook can manage a persistent value by hooking into it. You will walk through the design and implementation of each hook with code so that you gain a solid understanding. Finally, you'll get to grips with each Hook's pitfalls and find out how to effectively overcome them. By the end of this React book, you'll have gained the confidence to build and write Hooks for developing functional and efficient web applications at scale.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Creating a good state solution

States are quite capable. A component without states is like a function without variables. It would lack capabilities of reasoning. A piece of UI logic relies on states to work upon continuous interactions from users.

We built a custom state in the previous chapter as follows:

let states = {}
function _getM2(initialValue, key) {
  if (states[key] === undefined) {
    states[key] = initialValue
  } 
  return states[key]
}
function _setM2(v, key) {
  states[key] = v
  ReactDOM.render(<Title />, rootEl)
}

Though this approach works, there are a few problems we need to address before we can be seriously considered using it with React. We'll mention these problems one by one as follows.

The location where the states are allocated is the first major problem:

let states = {}

The preceding states variable is allocated as a global variable, but normally we&apos...