React One Guided Project

Lecture Video

Link to CodeSandbox used in the lecture (with lots of comments!)

Topics

• Class vs Function components
• state
• this.setState
• props
• Life Cycle Methods

Suggested Reading Material

• ReactJS for Beginners
• React, A bird's eye view

Steps to completing the project

1. Start in the App.js file in the components directory.

Class Component example:

class App extends Component {
  constructor() {
    super();
    this.state = {
      items: ['item1', 'item2', 'item3'],
    };
  }
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <SomeOtherComponent items={this.state.items} />
      </div>
    )
  }
}

• Note that every react component only renders out a single DOM element. So if you have more elements to render out, they'll need to be wrapped in a single element. You cannot render sibling elements.
• Note also the use of the constructor() and super(). When you extend a class you need to call super() to pass back up the elements to the original class. We are extending Component which is a class that comes from React.
• Notice that I called this array "items" and set it equal to this.state.items.
• React will read this attribute "items" and create and object called props that will look like this props = {items: ['item1', 'item2', 'item3']} You can access this props object in the child component SomeOtherComponent

Functional Component example:

const SomeOtherComponent = (props) => {
  // render them out to the term.   
  return (
    <ul>
      {props.items.map((element) => {
        return <li>{element}</li>
      })}
    </ul>
  )
}

• React tells props to come in as an obj. React knows this component needs props because we set them on as an attribute on <SomeOtherComponent items={this.state.props}/> as 'items'.
• Now inside of <SomeOtherComponent /> you can do stuff with props. Notice we're passing props in as a param. It will be an object called props that you can reference.
• Because this is a functional component you can simply iterate over a list of given elements and render each element to the screen.