I have a large React component with scrollbars. I'd like to make some small changes to a few components when it scrolls (basically to keep the left-most column of a table stuck to the left side of the screen).
Normally I'd pass props indicating the component's scroll position down to the components that need to update when it scrolls, but re-rendering the whole component when it scrolls makes the whole thing massively laggy. But the whole thing doesn't really need to be re-rendered -- only a few small parts of it to make sure they stay in the right part of the screen
Is there a good way to re-render only a small part of a component, or is there another way of dealing with frequent updates to large components like this?
Implementation might get a bit hairy but have you had a look into shouldComponentUpdate? (docs)
You could probably track the scrolling and use it to skip updating on the pieces you don't want to update - eg. pass an isScrolling prop to some children and skip update if it's true, or only update if the scoll distance has changed by a certain amount or a certain amount of time has passed.
Depending on the visual effect you want another option is to replace the content of the slow part with a placeholder which is more easily rendered when the isScrolling prop is set - we do something similar with an isLoading prop and loading GIFs, which works well.
Related
I am trying to use a parent component to control animations in a child Canvas element. Specifically I want an animation to happen when a user inputs a correct answer.
It works until the user changes the state in the parent component, and then it no longer works.
I've made a stripped-back, minimal version of my code here to show my issue: https://codesandbox.io/s/epic-leaf-08jqvy?file=/src/App.js
My desired behaviour is that the red box bounces when a user clicks submit. That happens if they don't type anything in the input box, but as soon as you enter anything into there - changing state and re-rendering the component - the button no longer triggers the animation in the Canvas child component.
As far as I can tell, the issue is to do with changing the state when inputing text. If I make a version where the input is just assigned to a variable, it works fine, but I need to be able to use state and re-render other parts of it.
I have put a console.log in the jump() function, so I can see that it is being called, but no animation is taking place in the canvas.
I assume that what's happening is that everything is being re-rendered when the state changes, and so the useRef is no longer tracking to the right thing.
Things I've tried:
putting the canvas in a memoized component to prevent it from re-rendering
using eventlisteners to see if I can trigger the animations in other ways - keydown ones work, but I need the user to be able to type, so I tried other ones (like hashchange or audio.play) but neither of those worked.
You can see the thing I'm actually trying to build here: https://papaya-platypus-86565f.netlify.app/play Basically users answer questions and an animation plays depending on whether they're right or wrong, to give it a game-y feel.
Thanks!
I like your red box as well as your reasoning. Yes, the input state changing on keystroke is causing the entire App component to re-render. Note that your App.js component has a lot going on (all good stuff), such as your Box class instantiation, your canvas instantiation, etc.
The key is to break your components into smaller parts, particularly separating stateful components from non-stateful components. We don't want your canvas re-mounting on every input change, so we make them sibling components!
Here's a working example of your code, just in smaller components:
https://codesandbox.io/s/strange-julien-d3n4zm
I hope this helps.
I have a situation where I can have a lot of forms, thus a lot of components to render.
So, I'm using memo to try to avoid re-rendering everything every time.
I pass the index to each of my child component.
When prepending, all the elements see their index doing +1 and thus, they all re-render again and again. Is there a way to avoid that ?
Here in the picture, all the element in the form 30 re-rendered, and I want to avoid that (pretty slow when all the teeth are selected)
I create 2 Text Boxes one with hook and the another one with the old style, now in Hook mode when the user input change the textbox value the whole page rendered, but with old style there only the text-box rendered not the whole page, if you have the complex page with many objects like (Data Table, form, buttons, inputs, etc..) the single change on one of these components forced to re-render everything and it decease performance, for example typing in the text-box take time to effect on page and the delay time is more than user typing speed.
the one workaround solution is using the callbacks and useMem but if the page is complex(lots of objects as described, and all of these objects has many properties the callback and useMem is very very complicated to handle single object property.
SandBox Example
This is exactly how react hooks should work. what will cause a rerender in react? two things:
change in props
change in hooks or say in a better way hooks state
in the second case, the useInput state is changing so that causes a rerender and it's absolutely normal behavior. I think using custom hook in that way is not a good practice.
I recommend reading this article for more information on react rendering: https://www.codebeast.dev/usestate-vs-useref-re-render-or-not/
This Is more of a "theoretical" question that often buffles me in different situations and use cases, I will give a simple example to demonstrate it.
Let's say I have a list of 10 buttons.
Everrytime I click a button, a floating menu appears on top of the clicked button - there is only one menu visible for any given time.
Let's assume that I can't render this floating menu within the button component and I can only render it in the buttons parent level (meaning that this menu is sibling to those buttons).
I have 2 possible options to do that:
Keep the x,y position of the last clicked button and render the menu in this given position
Render the menu once and using "ref" to directly relocate the menu
On the one hand, the first approach seems more "Reactish". On the other hand, the possible implemention I can think of is pretty ugly (capturing the clicked item position and saving it to state which triggers defender), and further more, I am not so sure about re re rendering the whole container just because I need to move a small piece of it.
The second approach touches the DOM directly using refs. Although possible , doing DOM manipulations sometimes feel bad to me.
Is there a better approach? Which of the 2 makes more sense?
Any suggestion or thoughts will be appreciated!
Thanks
React uses whats called a virtual DOM, which is a representation of the DOM, that sits on top of the real browser DOM. Whenever you update state or a user performs an action the virtual DOM compares and checks the changes with the real DOM and then updates the UI accordingly.
So if certain DOM elements like a are not different between changes it does not get re rendered, only the DOM elements that have changed are re rendered. And if a property on a DOM element is changed, only the property is updated and the DOM element is not re rendered.
<div color="blue" />
to
<div color="red" />
The whole element is not destroyed and re created, only the property is changed.
However if the element in the host tree is different than the entire host tree is destroyed and recreated.
<div />
to
<p>
This is refereed to as reconciliation
https://reactjs.org/docs/reconciliation.html
So using refs is definitely more of a hacky solution since its more of an escape hatch and directly manipulates the DOM.
I would definitely stick with option 1, I think there is an elegant solution to the use case you described, it would involve just adding a click event listener in the componentDidMount and keeping track of the click position that way.
And also its hard to say without code but since your buttons will be the same, they will not be re rendered only the menu will.
Would recommend for further reading
https://overreacted.io/react-as-a-ui-runtime/
According to the docs, one should avoid having multiple components with state. I am in the situation where I want to make a text box that automatically expands vertically as the user writes, and for that I'm using this trick http://www.impressivewebs.com/textarea-auto-resize/, which means I need to get the height of a component. Now, I've been playing around with it a bit, and it doesn't seem feasible to pass a ref to my parent component which contains state, so the easy way out would be to keep a piece of state in the component with the textbox, and then use the ref from there.
This got me thinking, how exactly do multiple state components negatively affect my app? Is it only maintainability / comprehensability? Or are there actual performance issues with it? I've noticed a lot of open source react components that you would just plug in to your app keep state, meaning if you use open source components, chances are you will have several state components in your app.
It's totally ok to use local state for this kind of tricks on DOM. It's even better approach, than to share such implementation details to parent components.
In general, use this places for state:
Application-wide data in stores outside React (redux, flux-store, observables)
Form temporary data can be placed in store also. But if don't need it anywhere else except form, it's better to place this data in form component.
Tricks on DOM, short living and very local state can be placed in component that just need it
are there actual performance issues with it?
No. If you'll place all your state in components, your application will become even faster. Because when you update local state, only this component and it's childs updates.
But you shouldn't do that, because it kills maintainability.
lot of open source react components that you would just plug in to your app keep state
If component doesn't allow you to control it through the props - it's bad component. Usually open source components written to be easier to use, so they provide nice defaults, that allow you to just place component to your application, and be happy with that.
For example, Tabs component usually controlls selected tab using local state. But also it takes selectedTab and callback onSelect, so you can control it by yourself.
Stupid components (like your textarea component) should not have state with data. But they can have their own UI state.
In this case you can easily keep textarea height in state of stupid component.