Can I live preview React components in VSCode? - reactjs

New to React. I have been using live server for html files in VS Code but I can't seem to find the same functionality for React components (.js files). Maybe it's obvious or I'm looking for the wrong thing.
I'd like to make changes in the component, especially MUI styling and see the incremental results in a live preview, rather than the entire application having to refresh and click back to the form I'm working on. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks.

You don't have to change your code when using storybook. You just have to write new files, that import your component. Then you can pass it fake props to see how it behave depending in many scenarios. If you use create-react-app, it super easy to install, if you have your own config, then your level is good enough to follow their tutorial. The files are formatted like this: MyComponent.stories.js . Then storybook will look at all files that contains "stories" in their name, and launch them on port 6006 when you write yarn/npm run storybook in your terminal. I highly recommend storybook, it is used by most of companies.

Couldn't find a satisfactory solution and not willing to invest too much. Storybook looks like I'd have to change my code and because I'm still relatively new to react, not sure I'm up for that.
I'm just letting VSCode restart server each time I save a change then going to the browser and clicking through the menus to get to the page I'm working on.
For more complex ui changes, I'll create a code sandbox mini react app and just work on that for, like css changes, etc.
UPDATE:
I've implemented Storybook and I like it. After following the doc to install it I saw that I just needed to create a file (story) for a component like MyComponent.stories.js and put in the few lines of code to import and use it, passing in whatever props I wanted to see.
I decided to put my stories files into a separate separate stories folder under src. Here's an example for a Details component:
import React from 'react';
import { action } from '#storybook/addon-actions';
import Details from '../Details';
// How to display the component in Storybook page
export default {
title: 'Details',
component: Details,
// Our exports that end in "Data" are not stories.
excludeStories: /.*Data$/
};
// Props passed into component
export const recordData = {
record: {
id: '1',
createdOn: '2020-04-20 4:07 PM',
createdBy: 'dgarv',
modifiedOn: '2020-04-20 4:07 PM',
modifiedBy: 'dgarv',
}
};
// Use the actual component
export const Default = () => <Details {...recordData} />;

I've developed an extension named AutoPreview that you can use it to preview React/Vue component in VS Code.
You can get it in extension market: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jawei.autopreviewer&ssr=false#overview

You can use Preview.js to see the rendered code - https://previewjs.com/docs/platforms/vscode

Related

could not find icon null every time I type something

I'm using fontawesome for icons, but something went wrong somewhere and now, every time I type something the console shoots out a version of:
Could not find icon null
When I fist load/refresh the page I get 5:
I see where the errors are happening, but I'm not sure why. Is it a local host thing? I have inputs where I'm handling the change with (ev) and setting a state. On every keypress or handleChange I get new, weirder and longer errors like:
I'm not really sure what's causing them. Based on what I've seen in other questions posted, it's my fontawesome icons, but I don't see why or how since all the icons I'm using render fine. I'm using webpack, so maybe somethings happening there.
EDIT: It's for sure happening because of fontawesome, still not sure why. Ran a test with a different component and no error. Any component that has a fontawesome icon, throws errors on any change.
The error was actually coming from these lines I had in two of my components:
import { icon } from "#fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core";
Basically, I was adding all the icons I was planning on using to my library in my main App.jsx file, but forgot that I was trying to render another icon (one that wasn't added to the library) in one of my components:
DOWNLOAD{" "}
<FontAwesomeIcon icon={icon({ name: "download", style: "solid" })} />
This was the way I had imported and rendered icons before using the library and I guess one of my js files was throwing an error trying to import { icon } that didn't exits.

I am confuse reactjs component design

How do I or what is the alternative method to break this layout into react component? The code below is bootstrap 4 for simplicity and what I want to achieve is something like this https://codedthemes.com/demos/admin-templates/material-able/bootstrap/default/ where contents are dynamic which is actually consist of different components. So what I am showing here is the simplified HTML code of the actual thing but has a similar structure. The question here how do I break them into components with this HTML structure? Many thanks in advance and appreciate any helps. Thanks again.
<div class="wholepage">
<navbar>
</navbar>
<sidebar>
<dynamiccontent>
</dynamiccontent>
<sidebar>
</div>
What you are describing is one of the selling points of React - the ability to modularise bits of code into what React calls components.
To build something like what you have linked you would need to nest components.
Using the example you might have an app.js that looks something like this.
import React from 'react'
import graph1 from './components/graph1'
import graph2 from './components/graph2'
const app = () => {
return (
<div>
<graph1 key1="props data goes here"/>
<graph2 key1="props data goes here"/>
</div>
)
}
export default app;
graph1 and graph2 are seperate components that have been imported and then nested in the app component as shown below.
The key1 attributes in each component accept values/functions that are passed down to graph1 and graph2 components for further processing and/or display. This is what allows you to make the content dynamic.
What I've mentioned above is very rudimentary but I think answers your question. ReactJS is a massive topic and will take a lot of practice to get used to. is well documented and there is a lot of fantastic documentation, examples and discussion online such as:
React components
React Props
React Design Patterns
DISCLAIMER: Fairly new to react myself, just trying to share the knowledge :)

Import a file as a string (or source asset) in Gatsby / React

I want to import .ts, .tsx, .js, and .jsx files into a react component and render them within a PrismJS highlighting block. For example, let's say I have a TypeScript file with functionA in it that I want to highlight in my actual website:
functionA.ts:
export function functionA() {
console.log("I am function A!");
}
I want to include this in a different component. The problem is, when I import it, I am obviously importing the webpack module version of it. My weak attempt at trying to get my function render in a react component looks like this:
MyComponent.tsx:
import * as React from "react"
import { functionA } from "./functionA"
export function MyComponent() {
return (
<>
<h1>Here is your code block:</h1>
<pre>
<code>
{functionA.toString()}
</code>
</pre>
</>
)
}
and what will actually render on the page where the code block is will look something like this:
Here is your code block:
WEBPACK__IMPORT.functionA() {
console.log("I am function A!")
}
I can't exactly remember what the .toString() function output looked like, but the point is it is NOT just the contents of the file how it appears in a code edit for example - it has been modulized by WebPack.
So, in a Gatsby project, how can i get these various code snippets to be imported directly as a string, purely as they are written, without WebPack enacting its import stuff on it? Is there a plugin or some way to tell Webpack to use the imported file as its asset/source module type? I know for MD or MDX files there is the gatsby-remark-embed-snippet, but I am building a component based HTML page and can't use MD or MDX files!
It's very late, and perhaps I just can't see the forest from the trees, I know there must be a way to do this...
You need to require the file using webpack's raw-loader, i.e:
const functionA = require("!!raw-loader!./functionA");
This works for create-react-app, as in the solution discussed here, and this works for Gatsby as well!
After using require on such a file, the file contents can be rendered in the component as:
<pre>{functionA.default.toString()}</pre>
It's then up to you to add syntax highlighting using a tool like prism or similar.
Note this solution will only work as long as Gatsby V3 continues to use WebPack v4, as raw-loader is deprecated in WebPack v5 and will be phased out for asset/source type modules.

How to import a component or file in React using variables?

I'm building a web app using React that shows the blueprint for the building you select, in an already selected campus.
I have a "Content" component that loads the campus or building map, depending what you chose.
The "BuildingMap" component needs to load a specific blueprint according to what building you selected. It gets the props.building with the name of the building but I don't know how to load a component using that variable.
I have tried import, fetch and require but nothing seems to work.
Please help.
My code looks something like this:
//Content Component
<BuildingMap building={selectedBuilding} campus={selectedCampus} />
//BuildingMap Component
import *MyBlueprint* from (specific folder depending on the campus selected)
class BuildingMap extends React.Component {
render(){
return (
<div className="blueprint" id={this.props.building}>
{*MyBlueprint*}
</div>
)
}
}
Unfortunately, you cannot import/require components dynamically in React environment.
Depending on how many buildings/blueprints there are, it's possible to import them one by one, create component-building map and pick component by building ID.
If there are many/infinite components to load, I would surely pick another method - don't know content of your problem.
import BlueprintA from './BlueprintA'
import BlueprintB from './BlueprintB'
import BlueprintC from './BlueprintC'
// ...
class BuildingMap extends React.Component {
render(){
const C = {
buildingA: BlueprintA,
buildingB: BlueprintB,
buildingC: BlueprintC,
// ...
}[this.props.building]
return (
<div className="blueprint" id={this.props.building}>
<C />
</div>
)
}
}
This question is pretty old but as I was looking for how to solve the same problem let me give my answer. It can be done with dynamic import React.lazy:
const OtherComponent = React.lazy(() => import('./OtherComponent'));
See more details here: https://reactjs.org/docs/code-splitting.html#reactlazy
To add to #Andreyco's answer:
Using a lookup table of string IDs/names to component classes is a typical React idiom. One common use case is a modal manager component that can render multiple different types of modals. For some examples, see Dan Abramov's answer at "How can I render a modal dialog in Redux?" (not Redux-specific), as well as some of the related articles in the React Component Patterns#Modal Dialogs and Redux Techniques#UI sections of my React/Redux links list.
Per #azium's comment: it is definitely possible to use dynamic importing (via require.ensure() or the new import() function) to load chunks at runtime, and you could add the exports from those dynamically imported chunks into a lookup table when they are loaded.

Reactjs overide markdown types with react-markdown

I am using contentful to get markdown to a react component that uses react-markdown to parse the markdown
import ReactMarkdown from 'react-markdown';
<Markdown source={text} />
Would I like to do is to override the Renderer so instead of it rendering ## as an h2 render i can pass a custom component to override the default h2 type to my own h2 component. How can i do that and is there and examples?
One of the options to <ReactMarkdown> is renderers.
One of the common renderers handles headings. If you look at the default rendering you'll see this:
heading: function Heading(props) {
return createElement('h' + props.level, getCoreProps(props), props.children);
},
So pass in your own heading handler. Check the level inside, roughly:
function CustomHeading(props) {
if (props.level !== 2) {
return createElement(`h${props.level}`, getCoreProps(props), props.children);
}
return <MyCustomElement {...props} />
}
If you don't have access to the code that commonmark-react-renderer gives you in the context of your function (which you probably won't) then you'd also need to duplicate what createElement gives you (but it's simple).
Unrelated: I've never used <ReactMarkdown> (but will), but this took me about five minutes of research. I'm including my path to encourage others to dig into their own questions and hopefully give some insight into how such things can be researched.
The react-markdown home page
Scanned through the "Options" section to see if custom rendering was trivially supported
Found the renderers option, which sounded promising
Clicked the link provided in that option's docs
Saw that heading was one of those (which made sense; I'd expect a renderer for every major formatting that Markdown supports)
Opened up the src directory to see if the implementation was easy to find
There was only one file, so I opened it
Searched the page for "heading" and found it
Cut and pasted that code here
The ability to read docs and follow trails is really important.

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