React component does not re-render, but render() gets called - reactjs

This is my component. It renders the first time. Subsequently, even though render gets called, it does not change the DOM.
Render is getting called at the right times, because I have redux set up and my 'mapStateToProps' seems to work correctly, in that it detects a change in application state, and calls render().
The console log does log the fact that the string has changed.
You would probably like to see more code, but I'm hoping that I'm missing a fundamental concept here that someone can just point out. I'm not sure how to put my whole project up here. Thanks. Again, render DOES get called, so shouldn't it update the DOM?
import React from 'react';
import { Component } from 'react';
import { connect } from 'react-redux';
import {bindActionCreators} from 'redux';
class TinyMCETestResultElement extends Component {
render (){
console.log ("this.props.form0DataToDisplay " + this.props.form0DataToDisplay)// logs a changed string, as expected
return (
<div>
<div>results: {this.props.form0DataToDisplay}</div>
</div>
)
}
}
function mapStateToProps(state){
//whatever gets returned will show up as props inside of
return{
form0DataToDisplay: state.tinyMceTestData
}
}
export default connect( mapStateToProps, null)(TinyMCETestResultElement )

Math.random() in render block is the reason of such components behaviour.
React will rerender component only in case of it's state or props was changed. There is no updated props/state in your code sample, so component rendered only ones.
You can create variable in store for random value and update it with Math.random() into reducer. Then use it in your component as props and all wonna be ok.

It's probably because Redux's connected component is implementing shouldComponentUpdate for you, and it sees that your props don't change. As a result it won't update that component for you.
You can read about it here:
Redux Docs: http://redux.js.org/docs/basics/UsageWithReact.html
"...we suggest instead generating container components with the React Redux library’s connect() function, which provides many useful optimizations to prevent unnecessary re-renders. (One result of this is that you shouldn’t have to worry about the React performance suggestion of implementing shouldComponentUpdate yourself.)"
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/719723707124604928
A quick fix would probably be to implement shouldComponentUpdate to always return true, overriding Redux's implementation. Or better, having your props change everytime you get a new random number.

I should have mentioned that I was using a tiny mce component as the source of the change in state. If anyone comes across this question, there seemed to be an issue with loading that component, which could be fixed by re-rendering after initial load. I added this code to the tiny mce component to fix it. Timer may not be necessary.
componentDidMount(){
var that = this;
setTimeout(function(){
that.forceUpdate();
}, 1)
}

Related

Is this.setState({}) guaranteed to cause a re-render

I inherited some code to maintain, with this line in it:
this.setState({}); // Force update
Is this guaranteed to cause a re-render?
setState merges the object passed as argument into the actual state in an immutable way. this.setState({}) will merge nothing to state but will actually return a new object, the shallow comparison performed by React will always assert to false and a re render will be triggered, unless explicitly cancelled with shouldComponentUpdate. So yes, in this case it is equivalent to forceUpdate and it comes with the same caveats.
You can actually test it easily:
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { Button } from 'react-native';
class Test extends Component {
render() {
console.log('render');
return <Button onPress={() => this.setState({})} title='Test' />;
}
}
export default Test;
Every time the button is clicked, the console.log triggers.
An interesting point is that if you replace this.setState({}) by this.setState(), there is no re-render after a click.
According to the documentation it is and several other methods in order
static getDerivedStateFromProps()
shouldComponentUpdate()
render()
getSnapshotBeforeUpdate()
componentDidUpdate()
please see this link for detailed
It depends. If you want to render a component, react internally checks is DOM equals with previous(this occurs if props of component is not changed at all). If dom equals with previous version, react checks shouldComponentUpdate. forceUpdate is different than this.setState({}), which always render components.

When shouldComponentUpdate / render is called for child components of updated component

Having read a bunch of articles on the web about shouldComponentUpdate & render I want to double check if I get it correct when components are rerendered (render method is called) and when shouldComponentUpdate is called.
React docs (and dozens or articles say) that shouldComponentUpdate is called ONLY when new props are received or there is new state. But is seems that PureComponent does the same at first glance...
So to investigate it I wrote sample app:
parent component
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import './App.css';
import Hello from './Hello';
class App extends Component {
objWithName = { name: 'World' };
state = {
date: Date.now()
}
componentDidMount() {
setInterval(() => {
this.setState({ date: Date.now() });
}, 2000);
}
render() {
return (
<div className="App">
<p>Rendering timestamp {this.state.date}</p>
<Hello name={this.objWithName} />
</div>
);
}
}
export default App;
child component
import React from 'react';
export default class Hello extends React.Component {
shouldComponentUpdate() {
console.log('shouldComponentUpdate called');
return true;
}
render() {
console.log('render called');
return <p>Hello {this.props.name.name}</p>
}
}
So my first question is: is it completely true? I mean: In above code snippets, parent component in setInterval calls setState just to trigger its update, but this state is not used anywhere. And after doing that, child component is rerendered (render is called) & shouldComponentUpdate is called even though nothing has changed for him (it didn't receive any new props, nor state). I didn't find any explanation for this behaviour in React docs so I'm not sure how it works. What is more, if that child component didn't have any input props at (simply render static string) it would also get rerendered. Can sb explain it?
So my second question is: what does it mean new props/state is received by the component? Does it mean that object value is changed (for primitives simply new value, and for objects new reference)?
Third thing: assuming that a change in parent top most component (e.g. App.js) in the application happens (new prop or new state), does it mean that by default ALL react component that are currently rendered/mounted (even leafs that do not have any state, nor props that were changed) will rerender?
shouldComponentUpdate is just called from setState and forces render when returns true (default behaviour) - and updating DOM when different. This is by design to have a lifecycle/flow. When shouldComponentUpdate returns false then you can avoid unnecessary, usually costly render processing (and DOM update). PureComponent is just an optimized, ready to use component with shouldComponentUpdate defined to shallowly compare props (by comparing references).
React doesn't care if props/state are used, not using observables - you can use mobx for that.
New props means any change - it's shouldComponentUpdate responsibility to check swallowly or deep, depends what you need.
Yes, all children will be updated (forced to refresh node state/view in virtual DOM). It's fast/optimized process (operating on virtual tree) but they should use shouldComponentUpdate to limit theirs rerendering (and final DOM updates).

Redux mapStateToProps called multiple times

I have this very simple Component, which is connected to redux state and returns {fruit, vegetables}. Everything works fine, but let's say I have a graph inside the Component and I if receive only updated vegetable from API the graph is being recreated each time.
Here's my component:
const Products = ({ fruit, vegetable }) =>
<div className='Products'>
<div>{vegetable.map(....logic here)}</div>
<div>{Math.random()}</div> // this is to illustrate the component is rendering every time
<Graph>Here will be a chart or a graph with fruit</Graph> //but it gets re-rendered even though there is no new fruit
</div>
const mapStateToProps = (state) => {
return {
fruit: state.data.fruit,
vegetable: state.data.vegetable,
}
}
export default connect(mapStateToProps)(Products)
It seems to me that every-time, no matter which states is updated it re-renders the whole components.
Is there a way to prevent that?
When a React component gets rendered, the whole tree of components below it also gets rendered - at the exception of the components which shouldComponentUpdate hook returns false. So in your case, if the Products component gets rendered, it is normal that the Graph component also does.
You have two options here:
if your Products component does not use the fruit prop outside of the Graph component, you can connect directly your Graph component to the fruitstate, and use the pure option of the connect function to avoid re-renders when fruit does not change
you can define the shouldComponentUpdate hook in your Graph component to manually skip unnecessary renders, or use a helper library to do it for you, for example the pure helper of the recompose library
The first option is where optimizing react/redux apps / avoiding unnecessary renders generally starts: connect your components to the store at the lowest level where it makes sense. The second option is more of an escape hatch - but still often useful.
As you mention you use stateless components, you can use a higher-order component to benefit from the shouldComponentUpdate hook. To understand how this works, here's how a simple implementation of it could look like this:
function pure(BaseComponent, shouldUpdateFn) {
return class extends Component {
shouldComponentUpdate(nextProps) {
return shouldUpdateFn(this.props, nextProps);
}
render() {
return <BaseComponent { ...this.props } />;
}
}
}
This would give you a pure HOC that you could reuse over your app to avoid unnecessary renders: it works by wrapping your stateless component into a new component with the desired hook. You'd use it like so, for example:
export default pure(Graph, (props, nextProps) => props.fruit !== nextProps.fruit)
Still, i highly encourage you in having a look at recompose, which has more fine-grained implementations of this, and would avoid you to reinvent the wheel.
To prevent a component to rerender when receiving new props, you can implement shouldcomponentupdate() in Graph.
Use shouldComponentUpdate() to let React know if a component's output is not affected by the current change in state or props. The default behavior is to re-render on every state change, and in the vast majority of cases you should rely on the default behavior.
shouldComponentUpdate() is invoked before rendering when new props or state are being received. Defaults to true. This method is not called for the initial render or when forceUpdate() is used.
Returning false does not prevent child components from re-rendering when their state changes.
Currently, if shouldComponentUpdate() returns false, then componentWillUpdate(), render(), and componentDidUpdate() will not be invoked. Note that in the future React may treat shouldComponentUpdate() as a hint rather than a strict directive, and returning false may still result in a re-rendering of the component.
If you determine a specific component is slow after profiling, you may change it to inherit from React.PureComponent which implements shouldComponentUpdate() with a shallow prop and state comparison. If you are confident you want to write it by hand, you may compare this.props with nextProps and this.state with nextState and return false to tell React the update can be skipped.
To help you implementing shouldComponentUpdate(), you can use eitherReact shallow-compare() or a custom shallow compare function
Given your current code.
React will update the whole component when state is changed.
So Graph Component will get updated.
If you don't want Graph Component to get updated you can add shouldComponentUpdate in your Graph Component and introduce checks there for re-rendering like as follows
shouldComponentUpdate: function(nextProps, nextState) {
// You can access `this.props` and `this.state` here
// and check them against nextProps and nextState respectively.
// return boolean(false) if you don't want the component to re-render.
}

Limit Redux to update only components affected by the change

trying to understand React-Redux, i find it unusual that all my components get new props when ever any slice of the state get changed. so is this by design or i'm doing something wrong ?
example App
class App extends React.Component {
render(){return (
<div>
<Navbar data={this.props.navbar} />
<Content data={this.props.content} />
</div>);
}
}
select (state) => ({ navbar:state.navbar, content:state.content});
export default connect(select)(App);
Components
export const NavbarForm = props => {
console.log('RENDERING with props--->',props);
return (<h1>NAV {props.data.val}</h1>);
};
export const ContentForm = props => {
console.log('RENDERING CONTENT with props--->',props);
return (<h1>CONTENT {props.data.val}</h1>);
};
////////INDEX.js//////
const placeholderReducer = (state={val:0},action)=>{
//will update val to current time if action start with test/;
if(action.type.indexOf('TEST/') === 0)return {val:Date.now();}
return state;
}
export const rootReducer = combineReducers({
navbar:placeholderReducer,
content: (state,action)=>(state || {}), //**this will never do a thing.. so content should never updates right !!**
});
const store = createStore(rootReducer, {}, applyMiddleware(thunk));
render( <Provider store={store}> <App /></Provider>, document.getElementById('app')
);
setInterval(()=>{ store.dispatch(()=>{type:'TEST/BOOM'}) },3000);
okay in this app, what i expect is that Navbar component will get updated every 3000ms while content component will never updates because its reducer will always return the same state.
yet i find it really strange that both components does reRender every time an action is fired.
is this by design ? should i worry about performance if my app has 100+ component ?
This is entirely by design. React assumes that your entire app will be re-rendered from the top down by default, or at least a given subtree will be re-rendered if a certain component does a setState or something similar.
Because you only have the very top component in your app connected, everything from there on down is React's standard behavior. A parent component re-renders, causing all of its children to re-render, causing all of their children to re-render, and so on down.
The core approach to improving UI performance in React is to use the shouldComponentUpdate lifecycle method to check incoming props and return false if the component does not need to re-render. This will cause React to skip re-rendering that component and all of its descendants. Comparisons in shouldComponentUpdate are generally done using shallow reference equality, which is where the "same object references means don't update" thing becomes useful.
When using Redux and connect, you will almost always find yourself using connect on many different components in your UI. This provides a number of benefits. Components can individually extract the pieces of the store state that they need, rather than having to hand them all down from the root component. In addition, connect implements a default shouldComponentUpdate for you, and does a similar check on the values you return from your mapStateToProps function. So, in a sense, using connect on multiple components tends to give you a "free win" in regards to performance.
Further reading on the topic:
Redux FAQ: Connecting multiple components
React/Redux Links: Performance articles
Yes this is by design. Action is dispatched. Reducers run. Store subscribers get notified "the store has changed". Connected components are store subscribers.
Typically you just don't worry about it until you can actually measure a performance problem that you can attribute to this - don't prematurely optimize.
If you find out that it is a problem, then you can do one of the following:
Add a shouldComponentUpdate method to your components so they can see that the props they received aren't different and do not need to render (there are lots of Pure Render mixins & high order components available to make this easy)
Instead of connecting the top-level app, connect the Navbar and Content components directly. The App will never rerender, but the children will if the store changes. And react-redux automatically uses shouldComponentUpdate to only re-render the connected components that actually have new props.

Should updating props re-render the entire component?

Let's say I have a CookingClass component that gets initialized like this.
let teachers = makeTeachers(["Amber", "Jason", "Lily"])
let students = makeStudents(["Hopper"])
<CookingClass
teachers={teachers}
students={students}
/>
One of the teachers dropped out:
let newTeachers = makeTeachers(["Amber", "Jason"])
<CookingClass
teachers={newTeachers}
/>
It will make the entire component re-render. I am not sure whether React only calculates the diff and efficiently re-renders it or I must use shouldComponentUpdate to take care of it myself.
More real-world example might be implementing a Google map where there are a million markers and you want to replace one of the markers.
You're changing a so called Virtual DOM node. For every change in a virtual node shouldComponentUpdate() gets called. If you don't implement it yourself it will always return true;
So if you only want to reload your CookingClass in specific cases you would have to implement it yourself.
The pro of React is that it will only re-render Native DOM nodes when they will get changed in the Virtual DOM. This is the "render" which makes React so fast.
Based on your sample code, the component will re-render everytime.
You should use the react-redux (documentation) bindings to "connect" the component to the store.
// ConnectedCookingClass.js
import { connect } from 'react-redux';
import CookingClass from './CookingClass';
const mapStateToProps = (state) => {
return {
teachers: state.teachers,
students: state.students
};
};
const ConnectedCookingClass = connect(mapStateToProps)(CookingClass);
export default ConnectedCookingClass;
Then use this component elsewhere like so:
// OtherComponent.js
import ConnectedCookingClass from './ConnectedCookingClass';
const OtherComponent = React.createElement({
render() {
return (
<div>
<ConnectedCookingClass />
</div>
);
}
});
The react-redux bindings will do some smart things for you, like only re-rendering the component when the props returned by mapStateToProps are actually different than their previous value (via a shallowEqual comparison), so you should try to only return values here, no functions. Functions should be returned in mapDispatchToProps.
The default implementation of shouldComponentUpdate in react-redux will return true when:
ALWAYS if the component is a "pure" component (aka stateless-function)
When the props have been updated manually (after componentWillReceiveProps called)
When the store has changed and the new props are different than the old props.
Here's what that looks like from the source code:
shouldComponentUpdate() {
return !pure || this.haveOwnPropsChanged || this.hasStoreStateChanged
}
The real DOM Rendering is completely handled by React with very efficient innerHTML inserts and only for changes in the new data structure of your application VirtualDomTree.
shouldComponentUpdate() controls if the component should be recalculated or not. You should use it, when you are rendering statical data, for example. The output of the component will not change, so you could just return false and the first version of the component will be used for ever ;)

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