Will a stateless component re-render if its props have not changed? - reactjs

One thing I had learned about React is that if the props to a component don’t change, then React doesn’t bother re-rendering the component. Is that true for stateless components too? Or do they behave more like “stupid” functions and get executed every time?
For example, if I had:
import StatelessComponent from '../StatelessComponent';
export default class DocumentsTable extends React.Component {
state = {
something: 'foobar',
};
render() {
return (
<div>
{ this.state.something }
<StatelessComponent theOnlyProp='baz'>
</div>
)
}
};
When this.state.something updates its value, does <StatelessComponent> get re-rendered? Or is it “smart” enough to see that its props didn’t change, like other React components?

UPDATE 25.10.2018
Since React 16.6, you can use React.memo for functional components to prevent re-render, similarly to PureComponent for class components:
const MyComponent = React.memo((props) => {
return (
/* markup */
);
});
Also, memo does internal optimization.
And unlike a userland memo() higher-order component implementation, the one built into React can be more efficient by avoiding an extra component layer.
Blockquote
OLD ANSWER
Yes, they always re-render 1 (unless you use React.memo as explained above) if setState() is called in the component itself or one of its parents, because functional stateless components don't carry a shouldComponentUpdate. In fact, each React component is being re-rendered1 unless they implement shouldComponentUpdate.
Important to note is that calling render() doesn't mean that DOM Nodes are being manipulated in any way. The render method just serves the diff algorithm to decide which DOM Nodes need to really be attached / detached. Note that render() is not expensive, it's the DOM manipulations that are expensive. They are executed only if render() returns different virtual trees.
From React's documentation
Just to be clear, rerender in this context means calling render for all components, it doesn’t mean React will unmount and remount them. It will only apply the differences following the rules stated in the previous sections.
Just don't worry and let render() be called unless your component is huge, then you're better off with stateful Component that implements shouldComponentUpdate().
Look here for an interesting discussion.
1 means that render() function of the component is called, not that the underlying DOM node is being manipulated.

See react does not only rerenders only If props are changed it even rerenders itself if any state change is there. In your case the component will rerender as your state is changing. The way react works is based on an algorithm named Reconciliation, what this algorithm does is that it compares your virtual DOM with real DOM and if it sees any change then it rerender your actual DOM by replacing it with your virtual DOM so any change in state will cause rerendering of the whole component.

Will a Stateless component re-render if its props have not changed?
Yes. Stateless render function will be called even if nothing has changed. However, React will in the reconciliation phase compare the virtual DOM (generated by the render function) against the existing DOM. This is far in the pipeline, hence not ideal if the render function was costly to compute.
A Pure component does have a default shallow comparison of the property and would have stopped the render to be executed. See the Pure component as a normal class React component that has a shouldComponentUpdate that compare with a triple equal the existing properties and the new one.
That being said, you can wrap your Stateless component into a Pure Component by using Recompose.pure (https://github.com/acdlite/recompose/blob/master/docs/API.md#pure) which will automatically perform, like the Pure Component, a shallow comparison without compromising on the short syntax of the Stateless component.
import StatelessComponent from '../StatelessComponent';
const PureChildFromStatelessComponent = Recompose.pure(StatelessComponent);
// ...
<PureChildFromStatelessComponent ... />

Related

react native re-rendered components multiple times

In react native, I use some component like audio player, header etc. Also, I use console.log() for debugging for component I put log in start of components :
const MiniPlayer = (props) => {
console.log('Begain Mini Player ....');
return()
}
I got multiple logs, it's re-rendering is happening multiple time without any special event or state change.
app hasn't any issue and not working slow.
Should I control this re-rendering or is it common in react ?
As per your given snippet, MiniPlayer will re-render whenever its parent component re-renders. It's how react works. If a component updates, its entire subtree re-renders regardless whether the children components need it or not. To control it, you can use shouldComponentUpdate in a class component or extend the class with PureComponent, or wrap your component with React.Memo if it's a functional component. Since yours is a functional component, we can make changes to your component so that it re-renders only when its props change as follows.
const MiniPlayer = React.Memo((props) => {
console.log('Begain Mini Player ....');
return()
})
More resources here - shouldComponentUpdate, PureComponent and React.Memo
Also remember that using React.Memo is just going to perform a shallow comparison of props. So even if the values of props are equal but if the reference changes, it would still cause a re-render.
Should you control this re-rendering? Well that depends. If your component is a costly one which performs heavy computations whenever it updates, then you should control this, else it is not going to affect much, as the DOM anyways is going to perform a diff check to determine what is supposed to be updated.

Writing optimized React functional components

It is my understanding that the entire React Functional Component gets re-run when re-render is needed or there are any state updates, so how to properly manage the state inside these functions? Is it important to keep it empty of any members like event handlers that you wouldn't want to be re-created every time the function gets re-run?
Is there some sort of best practice for writing optimized functional components?
React Memo is something you might be looking for.
React.memo(...) is a new feature introduced in React v16.6. It works
similiar to React.PureComponent, it helps control functional
components re-renders. React.memo(...) is to functional components
what React.PureComponent is to class components. How do we use
React.memo(…)?
It is very simple. Let’s say we have a functional component, like this:
const Funcomponent = ()=> {
return (
<div>
Hiya!! I am a Funtional component
</div>
)
}
We simply pass the FuncComponent as argument to React.memo function:
const Funcomponent = ()=> {
return (
<div>
Hiya!! I am a Funtional component
</div>
)
}
const MemodFuncComponent = React.memo(FunComponent)
React.memo returned a purified component MemodFuncComponent. This component is what we will render in our JSX markup. Whenever the props and state changes in the component, React will check if the prev state and props and the next props and state are equal if not equal the functional component will re-render if they are equal the functional component will not re-render.
As for second question, yes it's true. You should avoid defining the function inside the render function or in case of functional components, avoid defining inside the function, it will cause unwanted calling of those functions and can result in unwanted behavior as well as cause it to be created every time the component re-renders.
The same goes for adding in-line callback functions for event handlers. They should be defined outside the render function.
As how I get it, You want to know how to manage or improve your react performance right? You are right every Component in react gets re-rendered when there are any state changes in this component or in the parent component (if there is).
So there is a tool (Chrome extension) that helps you finds out which part of the application get re-rendered whenever you make an action React developer tool.

Selective children component render

A basic question I need help here.
Whenever this.setState invoked at parent components, all the children components will be rendered. This will cause the performance issue if I have huge amount of child components.
Lets give an example,
Parent Component
handleToggleTick() {
const newObj = Object.assign({}, this.state, { iconName: ''});
this.setState({
iconName: newObj.iconName,
});
}
render() {
return(
<ChildComponentA iconName={this.state.iconName} toggleTick={() => this.handleToggleTick}></ChildComponentA>
<ChildComponentB></ChildComponentA>
<ChildComponentC></ChildComponentA>
)
}
Based on the example above, whenever handleToggleTick invoked from childcomponentA, setState invoked for new iconName. What I want is, only ChildComponentA only the one get render since props.iconName is related to it, but not for childcomponentB and childcomponentC.
I understand there is an option to check shouldComponentUpdate in childcomponent to prevent it get render. But, imagine I have over 100 of childcomponent, would it be frustrating to write over 100 times of shouldComponentUpdate method?
I need help here, please advice!
React doesn't provide any way to render children selectively. The component will either render or not. But I need to highlight a few points why this is not a problem when we use React in practice.
First of all, you don't need to manually implement shouldComponentUpdate for each component. If you don't want to rerender component if its props and state haven't changed, you can just extend from the PureComponent class instead of the Component class. Note that React.PureComponent's shouldComponentUpdate() only uses shallow comparison for state and props. But this shouldn't be a problem if you follow react best practices and avoid mutating the state.
Also, it's not practical to have more than 100 different components in one render method. React always encourages decomposing your UI into smaller components and using component composition. When we follow this approach, components will be nested inside each other in different levels instead of having a large number of components in one render method.
What I'm trying to explain is it's more practical and easy to manage when we compose our component in a nested fashion (2) rather than having lots of components inside a big container component (1).
In your example, if ChildComponentB and ChildComponentC are inside another component called ChildConatainerComponent then we only need to implement shouldComponentUpdate() for ChildConatainerComponent. Then it will automatically stop rendering any child element inside it.
render() {
return(
<ChildComponentA iconName={this.state.iconName}
toggleTick={() => this.handleToggleTick}/>
<ChildConatainerComponent/>
)
}
class ChildConatainerComponent extends PureComponent {
render() {
return (
<div>
<ChildComponentB/>
<ChildComponentC/>
</div>
);
}
}
Another very import concept to keep in mind is calling render function doesn't mean that React recreates all the DOM elements again. The render method only make changes to React virtual DOM which is an in-memory representation of DOM and it's faster than actual DOM. Then React compare versions of virtual DOM which are before the update and after the update and the actual DOM will be updated with only what has actually changed.
Another solution you could consider is moving iconName into ChildComponentA, considering this is the only component related to it.

ReactJS, Calling setState with same parameter

I have been reading the React docs and came across shouldComponentUpdate(). My understanding is that everytime setState() is called, a re-render of that component will be updated.
My question is that If the value to be updated is the SAME as the current state value, would this trigger a re-render event? or I would have to manually checks for the current value and value to be updated in shouldComponentUpdate()
The official React documentation states:
The default behavior is to re-render on every state change...
https://reactjs.org/docs/react-component.html#shouldcomponentupdate
This means that by default, render() will be executed if any of a component's state or props values changes.
You can override this default behavior using shouldComponentUpdate(). Here's an example that only updates if a state value changes.
shouldComponentUpdate(nextProps, nextState) {
return this.state.someValue !== nextState.someValue;
}
Note: this example completely ignores props. So, any changes to props will not trigger render().
Adding more to #Jyothi's answer regarding implementing shouldComponentUpdate() to skip unnecessary re-renders, in React 15.3 they introduced a new concept PureComponent. From reactjs docs
The difference between them is that React.Component doesn’t implement
shouldComponentUpdate(), but React.PureComponent implements it with a
shallow prop and state comparison.
This allows to skip unnecessary calls of render in class components by just implementing PureComponent instead of the usual Component. There are a few caveats with PureComponent though, from the docs about React.PureComponent’s shouldComponentUpdate():
... only shallowly compares
the objects. If these contain complex data structures, it may produce
false-negatives for deeper differences.
... skips prop updates for the whole component subtree. Make sure all the
children components are also “pure”.
Usage of PureComponent can in some cases improve performance of your app. Moreover, it enforces you to keep state and props objects as simple as possible or even better, immutable, which might help simplify the app structure and make it cleaner.
I dont know if I understood your question correctly but react only re renders when there is difference between virtual dom and real dom.
And as Jyothi mentioned in his answer that render method will be called irrespective of the value passed in the set state function but rerendering will depend on what this render method returns.
In functional components, calling setState() with the equal value won't cause a rendering, while in a class component it does: https://dev.to/sunflower/reactjs-if-it-is-setting-a-state-with-the-same-value-will-the-component-be-re-rendered-5g24
Note that we're just talking about virtual (React) renderings here. Brower-rendering won't happen in any case - i.e. neither in the functional component nor in the class component - as long as the state (or to be more precise: the effective DOM) doesn't change.

React render method being called every time parent rerenders

I have a react component, that I noticed is being rerendered every time the owner component renders, even though the props being passed have not changed.
Is this normal behavior? I thought a component only rerenders if the owner sends in new props, i.e. the props are changed have different values or some internal state changes.
Assuming the above is true are there any tricks to debugging what is changing to cause the component to rerender?
The whole point of React is to use Virtual DOM above actual DOM. render() method in your React Component is used to compute new VD, compare it with previous, and apply diff to AD. And there is a difference between e.g. React.DOM.div and your component in the render() method of another component - React needs to calculate VD of your component - obviously, due it's render() method - even if no props were passed.
However, you can explicitly tell React Component, should it invoke it's render() method or not - using the shouldComponentUpdate() hook. In React.createClass() notation you can use PureRenderMixin, which is nothing except next code injection:
import shallowEqual from 'react/lib/shallowEqual';
shouldComponentUpdate(nextProps, nextState) {
return !shallowEqual(nextProps, this.props) || !shallowEqual(nextState, this.state);
}
There are some ways to do it in ES6 notation - e.g. inheritance from PureRenderComponent, that contains the above hook.
See also https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/advanced-performance.html

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