If/Guard Clauses in React/Redux Components - reactjs

I have a React component that is being rendered and some initial data isn't available just yet. Because of that, I have these two if blocks (guard clauses) that check to see if we're in a state to even bother rendering. Basically, when this component is used, we're in a state where we have header records for the data, but none of the detail records yet. So this component is recognizing that and retrieving the detail before displaying.
This feels wrong, like this isn't the way it should be done in React/Redux. Further, that second if block could possibly cause an infinite loop. It basically checks to see if we have detail data for a header record. If not, we return and call props.onSortItemChanged() to begin the process of fetching the data. What if the data doesn't exist? Then we'd come back here and make the call again. Anyway, that's just one issue.
The main issue is that I believe a component like this shouldn't know or care about having to fix/retrieve data. It should just display with data that's already in a correct form. Is that right? If so, where is the right place to check and make sure the data is in good form? The action? The reducer?
render() {
const {
printSortOptions,
printSortDetails,
selectedPrintSortOption,
printSortDrawerEvent
} = this.props;
if (printSortDrawerEvent === printSortDrawerEventTypes.CLOSE ||
printSortDrawerEvent === printSortDrawerEventTypes.FAIL) {
return <div id="emptyDiv" />;
}
if (printSortOptions && printSortDetails.length === 0) {
const selectedOptions = printSortOptions.filter(o => o.isDefault);
this.props.onSortItemChanged(selectedOptions[0]);
return this.constructor.loadingJsx();
}
const selectedPrintSortDetails = printSortDetails.filter(
d => d.printSortOption.printSortId === selectedPrintSortOption.printSortId)[0];
return (
<div className="col-xs-12">
// remaining JSX here
)
}

Related

React hooks - Prevent rerender if parent state that holds children props changed

I have an issue with my current project that uses react hooks.
What I'm trying to do is just to select my tasks by using (shift+click). Look like this:
Here is the code:
...
const [selectedTaskIds, setSelectedTaskIds] = useState<string[]>([])
const selectTask = useCallback(
(e: MouseEvent<HTMLDivElement>, taskId: string): void => {
e.stopPropagation()
const previousTaskId = selectedTaskIds[selectedTaskIds.length - 1]
if (previousTaskId && e.shiftKey) {
// handle shift+click
const previousIdx = tasks.findIndex((task) => task.id === previousTaskId)
const selectedIdx = tasks.findIndex((task) => task.id === taskId)
const rangeTasks =
previousIdx < selectedIdx
? tasks.slice(previousIdx, selectedIdx + 1)
: tasks.slice(selectedIdx, previousIdx + 1)
const rangeIds = rangeTasks.map((task) => task.id)
setSelectedTaskIds([...new Set([...selectedTaskIds, ...rangeIds])])
} else {
// if no key clicked, just select 1 task item
setSelectedTaskIds([taskId])
}
},
[selectedTaskIds, tasks] // <==== in here I notice that activeTaskIds is changed overtime that causes all of my <TaskItem> rerender
)
return (
{tasks.map((task) => (
<TaskItem
key={task.id}
taskId={task.id}
onClick={selectTask} // <=== selectTask will be different if user click on one of the task items
active={selectedTaskIds.includes(task.id)}
/>
))}
)
The problem is, to know which tasks should I select when the user uses shift+click, I need to know the currently selected task ids, so that I need to pass selectedTaskIds as a useCallback() deps.
That makes whenever the user selects the tasks or even just a click on one of the task items to select the task, it will re-render all of my <TaskItem> since the selectTask() function change due to useCallback's deps changed.
How can I solve this without rerender all of my <TaskItem>s? Thank you so much!
I tested your code on my machine and tested out a few scenarios. As far as I can tell, it looks natural for the component to re-render the all of the <TaskItem>s because any change in the selectedTaskIds state will guarantee everything inside the component that holds selectedTaskIds to render. To show you a concrete example,
<div className="App">
<TaskItems />
<div>hahaha</div>
<div>selectedTaskIds</div>
</div>
Let's say you have the above code. (I named your component that holds multiple <TaskItem/>s as <TaskItems/>) When onClick of <TaskItem/> triggers, only <TaskItems/> will re-render. The two other divs are not re-rendered. However, if you place the two divs inside the <TaskItems/> component, they will re-render:
// assuming this is inside <TaskItems/>
...
return (
<div>
{tasks.map((task) => (
<TaskItem
key={task.id}
taskId={task.id}
onClick={(e) => { selectTask2(e, task.id)}} // <=== selectTask will be different if user click on one of the task items
// active={selectedTaskIds.includes(task.id)}
active={true}
title={task.title}
/>
))}
<div>hahaha</div>
<div>selectedTaskIds</div>
</div>
);
above code will re-render the two divs.
I have tried to fulfill your request to get rid of the re-renders of the tasks that weren't changed, but it was really hard to do so. When I try to prevent re-rendering I usually use one of the two techniques:
create a child component and separate the code base to isolate groups of states. (since states are what triggers renders, you can
separate unrelated ones into different groups.)
useCallback/useMemo
Either techniques I failed to implement for your case, but there may be a way to apply the above techniques. I will follow the thread to see if anyone else gets a solution.

How to design my React project better without using shouldComponentUpdate

I am trying to construct 1-minute candlestick.
I have a component that will continuously passing a number (the trade price) to his child component.
This child component will keep update its state: (High, Low, Open, Close) base on the new number he gets from the parent. (e.g. if the number coming in, is higher than the current this.state.high, it will update this.state.high to the new number) After every minute a setInterval function it will take the states and construct a candle and pass it down to its own children.
the state are:
high, low, open, close, newCandle
I got it working by using
shouldComponentUpdate(nextProps:props, nextState:state){
if(this.props !== nextProps)
this.updateStates(nextProps.newTradePrice); //will update the high, low, open, close state
if(JSON.stringify(nextState.nextMinuteCandle) !== JSON.stringify(this.state.nextMinuteCandle) ) //once the one minute interval is up, there will be a function that will auto set the newCandle state to a new Candle base on the current high, low, open, close state
return true;
return false;
}
I read in the document that shouldComponentUpdate should only be used for optimization not to prevent something to reRender. I am using this to prevent reRender and infinite loop.
I've been stuck on this for days, I cant figure out a way to design this better. Any advice on how to design this better?
2nd related question:
In fact I am relying on shouldComponentUpdate for almost ALL my component too. This can't be right. e.g.
I have a CalculateAverageVolume child component, that takes in the this.state.newCandle. And update the volume every time the newCandle changes (i.e. every minute)
constructor(props: props) {
super(props);
this.state = {
[...],
currentAverage: 0,
showVolume: true
};
}
onCloseHandler()
{
this.setState({showVolume: false});
}
updateAvg(newCandleStick: CandleStick){
//do caluation and use this.setState to update the this.state.currentAverage
}
shouldComponentUpdate(nextProps:props, nextState:state)
{
if(JSON.stringify(this.props.candleStick) !== JSON.stringify(nextProps.candleStick) || this.state.showVolume !== nextState.showVolume){
this.updateAvg(nextProps.candleStick);
return true;
}
return false;
}
render() {
return (
<>
{(this.state.showVolume &&
<IndicatorCard
cardHeader="Volume"
currentInfo={this.state.currentAverage.toString()}
onCloseHandler={()=>this.onCloseHandler()}>
</IndicatorCard>
)}
</>
);
}
}
Can someone please teach me how to design this or restructure this? This works perfectly, but doesn't seem like the right way to do it
I would simplify the component like below.
import { useMemo, useState, memo, useCallback } from "react";
function Component({ candleStick }) {
// use props here to calculate average
const updateAverage = () => 0; // use candleStick props to calculate avg here
const [showVolume, setShowVolume] = useState();
// Compute the average from prop when component re-renders
// I would also add useMemo if `updateAverage` is an expensive function
// so that when prop remains same and `showVolume` changes we don't need to calculate it again
const currentAverage = useMemo(updateAverage, [candleStick]);
const onCloseHandler = useCallback(() => setShowVolume(val => !val), []);
return showVolume ? (
<IndicatorCard
cardHeader="Volume"
currentInfo={currentAverage}
onCloseHandler={onCloseHandler}
/>
) : null;
}
// If true is returned, component won't re-render.
// Btw React.memo by default would do shallow comparison
// But if deep comparison function is required, I would use lodash or other utility to do the check instead of JSON.stringify.
const arePropsEqual = (prev, next) =>
isEqual(prev.candleStick, next.candleStick);
export default memo(Component, arePropsEqual);
shouldComponentUpdate is usually reserved for discrete events that you can control. Howevr, it seems like you are dealing with a continuous stream of data.
Two ways to handle it:
Pass down a function reference that handles a stream to the child component and let that handle you state updates in your child component.
Use the context API to inform child component about the changes
Reference implementation :
Upadting State with Context API : https://javascript.plainenglish.io/react-context-api-part-2-updating-state-through-a-consumer-7be723b54d7b
Streams : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Streams_API/Using_readable_streams
React with Streams : https://blog.bitsrc.io/how-to-render-streams-with-react-8986ad32fffa
I hit the same spot you're in when starting React. The problem here is that React, at least the basic aspects of it, isn't enough when you're talking about data flow. What you need to look into is a React data management framework, of which Redux is probably the most popular. Go look at Redux and make sure you're looking at the latest documentation based around hooks.
You'll say to yourself "Oh! That makes perfect sense" - I know I did.
Other, similar frameworks are React Query and React's own Context API. The main point I'm trying to make is that you really need data management to do the thing you're looking for.

Mutable global state causing issues with array length

I've been working on a SPA for a while and managing my global state with a custom context API, but it's been causing headaches with undesired rerenders down the tree so I thought I'd give react-easy-state a try. So far it's been great, but I'm starting to run into some issues which I assume has to do with the mutability of the global state, something which was easily solved with the custom context api implementation using a lib like immer.
Here's a simplified version of the issue I'm running into: I have a global state for managing orders. The order object primaryOrder has an array of addons into which additional items are added to the order - the list of available addons is stored in a separate store that is responsible for fetching the list from my API. The orderStore looks something like this:
const orderStore = store({
initialized: false,
isVisible: false,
primaryOrder: {
addons: [],
}
})
When a user selects to increases the quantity of an addon item, it's added to the addons array if it isn't already present, and if it is the qty prop of the addon is increased. The same logic applies when the quantity is reduced, except if it reaches 0 then the addon is removed from the array. This is done using the following methods on the orderStore:
const orderStore = store({
initialized: false,
isVisible: false,
primaryOrder: {
addons: [],
},
get orderAddons() {
return orderStore.primaryOrder.addons;
},
increaseAddonItemQty(item) {
let index = orderStore.primaryOrder.addons.findIndex(
(i) => i.id === item.id
);
if (index === -1) {
let updatedItem = {
...item,
qty: 1,
};
orderStore.primaryOrder.addons = [
...orderStore.primaryOrder.addons,
updatedItem,
];
} else {
orderStore.primaryOrder.addons[index].qty += 1;
}
console.log(orderStore.primaryOrder.addons);
},
decreaseAddonItemQty(item) {
let index = orderStore.primaryOrder.addons.findIndex(
(i) => i.id === item.id
);
if (index === -1) {
return;
} else {
// remove the item from the array if value goes 1->0
if (orderStore.primaryOrder.addons[index].qty === 1) {
console.log("removing item from array");
orderStore.primaryOrder.addons = _remove(
orderStore.primaryOrder.addons,
(i) => i.id !== item.id
);
console.log(orderStore.primaryOrder.addons);
return;
}
orderStore.primaryOrder.addons[index].qty -= 1;
}
}
})
The issue I'm running into has to do with the fact that one of my views consuming the orderStore.addons. My Product component is the consumer in this case:
const Product = (item) => {
const [qty, setQty] = useState(0);
const { id, label, thumbnailUrl, unitCost } = item;
autoEffect(() => {
if (orderStore.orderAddons.length === 0) {
setQty(0);
return;
}
console.log({ addons: orderStore.orderAddons });
let index = orderStore.orderAddons.findIndex((addon) => addon.id === id);
console.log({ index });
if (index !== -1) setQty(orderStore.findAddon(index).qty);
});
const Adder = () => {
return (
<div
className="flex"
style={{ flexDirection: "row", justifyContent: "space-between" }}
>
<div onClick={() => orderStore.decreaseAddonItemQty(item)}>-</div>
<div>{qty}</div>
<div onClick={() => orderStore.increaseAddonItemQty(item)}>+</div>
</div>
);
}
return (
<div>
<div>{label} {unitCost}</div>
<Adder />
</div>
)
}
export default view(Product)
The issue occurs when I call decreaseAddonItemQty and the item is removed from the addons array. The error is thrown in the Product component, stating that Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'id' of undefined due to the fact that the array length reads as 2, despite the fact that the item has been removed ( see image below)
My assumption is that the consumer Product is reading the global store before it's completed updating, though of course I could be wrong.
What is the correct approach to use with react-easy-state to avoid this problem?
Seems like you found an auto batching bug. Just wrap your erroneous mutating code in batch until it is fixed to make it work correctly.
import { batch, store } from '#risingstack/react-easy-state'
const orderStore = store({
decreaseAddonItemQty(item) {
batch(() => {
// put your code here ...
})
}
})
Read the "Reactive renders are batched. Multiple synchronous store mutations won't result in multiple re-renders of the same component." section of the repo readme for more info about batching.
And some insight:
React updates are synchronous (as opposed to Angular and Vue) and Easy State (and all other state managers) use React setState behind the scenes to trigger re-renders. This means they are all synchronous too.
setState usually applies a big update at once while Easy State calls a dummy setState whenever you mutate a store property. This means Easy State would unnecessarily re-render way too often. To prevent this we have a batch method that blocks re-rendering until the whole contained code block is executed. This batch is automatically applied to most task sources so you don't have to worry about it, but if you call some mutating code from some exotic task source it won't be batched automatically.
We don't speak about batch a lot because it will (finally) become obsolete once Concurrent React is released. In the meantime, we are adding auto batching to as many places as possible. In the next update (in a few days) store methods will get auto batching, which will solve your issue.
You may wonder how could the absence of batching mess things up so badly. Older transparent reactivity systems (like MobX 4) would simply render the component a few times unnecessarily but they would work fine. This is because they use getters and setters to intercept get and set operations. Easy State (and MobX 5) however use Proxies which 'see a lot more'. In your case part of your browser's array.splice implementation is implemented in JS and Proxies intercept get/set operations inside array.splice. Probably array.splice is doing an array[2] = undefined before running array.length = 2 (this is just pseudo code of course). Without batching this results in exactly what you see.
I hope this helps and solves your issue until it is fixed (:
Edit: in the short term we plan to add a strict mode which will throw when store data is mutated outside store methods. This - combined with auto store method batching - will be the most complete solution to this issue until Concurrent React arrives.
Edit2: I would love to know why this was not properly batched by the auto-batch logic to cover this case with some tests. Is you repo public by any chance?

Why does Object.keys(this.refs) not return all keys?

Hi,
so I've redacted some sensitive information from the screen shot, but you can see enough to see my problem.
Now, I'm trying to build the UI for a site that gets data from a weather station.
I'm trying to use react-google-maps' InfoBox, which disables mouse events by default.
It seems that to enable mouse events, you must wait until the DOM is loaded, and then add the event handlers.
react-google-maps' InfoBox fires an onDomReady event (perhaps even upon adding more divs) but seems to never fire an onContentChanged event (I've looked in the node_modules code).
The content I'm putting in the InfoBox is basically a div with a string ref for each type of weather data. Sometimes there comes along a new type of weather data so I want to put that in also, and have the ref be available / usable.
However, immediately after the new divs have been added (and the DOM has been updated to show them), when I try to console log the DOM nodes (the refs refer to the nodes because they are divs and not a custom built component) the latest added ones are undefined.
They do become a div (not undefined) a few renders later.
I've contemplated that this may be because
1) the DOM is not being updated before I'm trying to access the refs, but indeed the UI shows the new divs,
2) string refs are deprecated (React 16.5),
but they work for the divs in comonentDidMount and eventually for new divs in componentDidUpdate,
3) executing the code within the return value of render may be run asynchronously with componentDidMount, but I also tried setTimeout with 3000 ms to the same effect,
4) of something to do with enumerable properties, but getOwnProperties behaves the same way.
In the end I decided I'll console log this.refs and Object.keys(this.refs) within the same few lines of code (shown in the screen shot), and you can see that within one console log statement (where Object.keys was used in the previous line) that while this.refs is an object with 8 keys, the two most recently added refs don't appear in Object.keys(this.refs).
This is probably a super complex interaction between react-google-maps' InfoBox, React's refs, and JavaScript's Object.keys, but it seems like it should be simple and confuses me to a loss.
Can anyone shed some light on why this might be happening??
The code looks something alike:
class SensorInfoWindow extends React.Component {
handleIconClick = () => {
// do stuff here
}
componentDidMount() {
this.addClickHandlers();
}
componentDidUpdate() {
this.addClickHandlers();
}
addClickHandlers = () => {
const keys = Object.keys(this.refs);
for(let i=0; i<keys.length; i++) {
const key = keys[i];
let element = this.refs[key];
if (element !== undefined)
element.addEventListener('click', this.handleIconClick);
}
}
render() {
const { thissensor, allsensors } = this.props;
let divsToAddHandlersTo = [];
const sensorkeys = Object.keys(allsensors);
for (let i=0; i<sensorkeys.length; i++) {
divsToAddHandlersTo.push(
<div
ref={'stringref' + i}
/>
{/* children here, using InfoBox */}
</div>
);
}
return (
<div>
{divsToAddHandlersTo}
</div>
);
}
}
This is, in essence, the component.

Preserve internal state on page refresh in React.js

It must be pretty regular issue.
I'm passing props down to the children and I'm using it there to request to the endpoint. More detailed: I'm clicking on the list item, I'm checking which item was clicked, I'm passing it to the child component and there basing on prop I passed I'd like to request certain data. All works fine and I'm getting what I need, but only for the first time, ie. when refreshing page incoming props are gone and I cannot construct proper URL where as a query I'd like to use the prop value. Is there a way to preserve the prop so when the page will be refresh it will preserve last prop.
Thank you!
(You might want to take a look at: https://github.com/rt2zz/redux-persist, it is one of my favorites)
Just like a normal web application if the user reloads the page you're going to have your code reloaded. The solution is you need to store the critical data somewhere other than the React state if you want it to survive.
Here's a "template" in pseudo code. I just used a "LocalStorage" class that doesn't exist. You could pick whatever method you wanted.
class Persist extends React.Component {
constuctor(props) {
this.state = {
criticalData = null
}
}
componentDidMount() {
//pseudo code
let criticalData = LocalStorage.get('criticalData')
this.setState({
criticalData: criticalData
})
}
_handleCriticalUpdate(update) {
const merge = {
...LocalStorage.get('criticalData')
...update
}
LocalStorage.put('criticalData', merge)
this.setState({
criticalData: merge
})
}
render() {
<div>
...
<button
onClick={e => {
let update = ...my business logic
this._handleCriticalUpdate(update) //instead of set state
}}
>
....
</div>
}
}
By offloading your critical data to a cookie or the local storage you are injecting persistence into the lifecycle of the component. This means when a user refreshes the page you keep your state.
I hope that helps!

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