Author: matthiasweinreuter

React, in my opinion, has become quite a useful tool over the years. I admin I haven’t given the other major frameworks a try, but from the look of the resulting code, I only would give Svelte a real chance in the nearer future (in fact, you’d really have to pay me real big money to convince me about Angular).

Now with many of the more useful JS libraries, React is in a state where not only has it survived quite a time (reaching v18 only a few weeks ago), but also breeding a community that harbors a lot of valuable knowledge, enabling one to efecavoid the most common pitfalls at the beginning of your journey. There are lots of resources you can easily find online, from few-hour-courses to several posts in other blogs about the most common traps.

However, in our daily life it appears that there still are some very good points to make about how not to go about React’s unopinionatedness. So these are some of our own findings that I’ve not yet seen overly emphasized, and maybe they are here for your advantage.

1. HAVE YOUR STATES ATOMIC

It might happen that one migrates an older React component where functional programming wasn’t the norm yet, or out of whatever habit, that you declares something like a greedy React state as

const [state, setState] = useState({this: ..., that: ... , ..., ...});

Now your state profits much from immutability (think of this as “your machine then knows that it’s content is clear and unique, given any time”) and therefore you do not need to care about the same-or-not-sameness of state.that when evaluating state.this. Therefore, it is usually advised to split that up into several independent states as

const [this, setThis] = useState(...);
const [that, setThat] = useState(...);
...

That is more readable and everything. However, the most useful rule to build your states is not even to split everything up as small-as-possible, but rather, to have your states atomic. By that, we mean, “not needlessly large, but containing all what might change at the same time”.

One common example is basic data fetching. If you don’t choose to grab for react-query, which I personally like. But if you do e.g. a simple GET request, you usually do not only have “data” (some response), but also at least a “pending” (has the request finished yet?) and an “error” (is this response even usable?) field. These all change at the same time. Thus, they belong to the same entity. That state, designed atomically

const [query, setQuery] = useState({
    pending: false,
    data: null,
    error: null,
});

side note: you might choose not to use the null object as an initial value here because of the known problem of ambivalence with this object. For this illustration, it will suffice.

So, this query state now is atomic. Not to split further without serious consequences, as you will. If you had another, unrelated query, you would not just put it right into the same state entity; but if you had another property of that query (like e.g. a separate field for the status code, …), it would belong.

This helps in having more predictable useEffect, useMemo etc. dependency arrays. You can have an Effect depending on [query] as a whole and this makes complete semantic sense. It would be very hard to predict it’s behaviour, if you mashed multiple queries or whatever-state-you-can-think-of in there.

2.HAVE YOUR EFFECTS ATOMIC & TEAR THEM DOWN

Similarly, it is not super obvious (to the newcomer’s eye at least), that you can have multiple useEffects(). You can adhere to the Single Responsibility principle right there — the only good Effects are the ones that you can grasp in a twinkling of an eye. Use one each for every single thing you want to achieve, don’t lump multiple different things together in a somewhat-“constructor”-type of thinking. This keeps the dependency arrays small and controllable, and there are fewer cases of peculiar “But this CANNOT EVEN happen!!”.

Moreover, Effects have a function designed to clean them up, or the teardown function. If your Effect starts any larger operation and then for some reason your component get’s re-rendered before your operation is finished, you are likely to get hit by that effect in a state where you forgot about it already. You can follow this example

// example: listening to the scroll event
useEffect(() => {
    const handler = (event) => { /* ... */ };
    document.addEventListener('scroll', handler);
    return () => document.removeEventListener('scroll', handler);
}, []);

// or you might do something later in life
useEffect(() => {
    const timeout = setTimeout(() => { /* ... */ }, 5000);
    return () => clearTimeout(timeout);
}, []);

Some asynchronous operations might not have a simple teardown operation, but you can at least tell your Promises to disregard the effect. This is at least responsible for the very ugly

Warning: Can’t perform a React state update on an unmounted component. This is a no-op, but it indicates a memory leak in your application.

If you are responsible, you clean your Browser Console of all of these warnings. It appears if you call a setState-or-similar function at a point where the teardown actually should have happened. This pattern solves that case:

// this example uses a fetch Promise,
// but it also works for stale setTimeout handlers etc.

useEffect(() => {
    let mounted = true;
    fetch('/whatever').then(() => {
        if (mounted) {
            setState(true);
        }
    };
    return () => { mounted = false };
}, []);

// if you do not check for the value of mounted,
// the "memory leak" error can appear, if the
// fetch returns when the component updated meanwhile.

Side note: I also can not recall a single case in which the common React linter rule “exhaustive–deps” was worth ignoring. I had several occasions in which I believed to outsmart the stupid machine, only to end up in much larger problems down the road. Sure, things like Redux’ dispatch() might be cumbersome to include always, but I found that if I just make sure that exhaustive-deps never fires, I am more happy in the long run.

3.USEEFFECT() in too DEEP Functions

Especially in the context of data fetching, it might appear luring to put your useEffect() calls as deep (in the direction of the smallest components) as you can. Even more so, if you don’t have a rigid way of state management.

Now, I feel the point that this appears as “more modular” and flexible, but for me, has happend to situations where way too many requests were sent to our backends. You trade the modularity for the unpredictability of some Effects, so the best way I came to think of it was: Treat useEffect() like a bug.

I’m not saying that using it is wrong. But if you are wary of it’s appearance, this can help. Sometimes, it is just possible to do everything an Effect does – just completely outside React. Maybe, the Effect code can instead live in your index.js (as vanilla JS or otherwise) and just injected into your Root component, e.g. as props or via other libraries. E.g. with a Redux middleware, some effects can run with a higher degree of control about your state.

Remember: Modularity is not bad per se. It’s good. Don’t elevate the most particular effects to the top level of your application, but figure out where they can live well enough so you exactly know when they need to fire.

So far, there hasn’t been a case where I wished that I stuffed my useEffects further down to the virtual DOM leaves, but several, in which elevating them helped me a lot.

4. USE CUSTOM HOOKS with minimal interface

I consider it helpful, even for React beginners, to always be on the lookout of what could be its own React hook. A React Hook is any function that has a name beginning with “use” and for the most time, these consist of some combination of internal useState, useEffect, useContext and useRef definitions.

But their merit is in that they allow for much cleaner, dumber looking Components themselves – consider: dumb components are the best!

If they are only needed once, you can have them co-located next to where they are needed, but even just the act of giving them an own name makes for much more understandable code.

I use custom hooks for a lot of things, e.g.

• having a State that is persisted in the localStorage / sessionStorage
• having a State that updates in a debounced / throttled / delayed manner
• standardizing very basic data fetching
• accessing the window width at any time (nice for Responsive layout)
• creating a React ref for an element with an “clicked outside” handler
• standardized response of messages from connected websockets

I will now spare you the code, but if you have questions about any of these, just drop a comment.

One important point, though: Always have your interface minimal. E.g. if your custom hook has an internal setState(), think hard about whether you pass that function to the outside via the hook return value. Even if you are the only developer on a project, treat yourself as two different instances, one “framework designer” and one “framework consumer”, and as the designer, think hard about what havoc the consumer could do if you allow him too much.

5. Do not duplicate STATE informAtion (especially with react-router)

This applies to every state information, but it’s important to recognize that your URL route is just that: a kind of global state. One that your user can edit directly at any time, leaving the synchronization up to you.

So do not go about it by reading the URL parameters into some state that has it’s own setState! If you define a certain role of a state parameter in your URL, then it is your obligation to have a uni-directional data flow:

1. From the route, that value flows into your application in a clearly-defined manner,
2. where you act upon it as you wish, until you need to change it
3. Then you change the route. Then go back to 1

Of course, one might imagine that in some cases you can not guarantee that. Then maybe do your own synchronization logic, but I would highly advise you to stash that away into e.g. a custom hook, or middleware if you use Redux, so that you can test it thoroughly and it won’t break too soon.

Further note: There are situations where it is quite sensible to have two very similar states, if they have a different responsibility. These are not a bug.

E.g. if you GET a value from a server, then edit it in a controlled <input/> field, and PUT it to the server again, you do not wish to do so on every key press. Then these are not meant to be the same:

1. the value as you currently know it from the server
2. the value as it exists inside the <input/>

These are semantically different. They can and should be a different state entity. But if you have something that is utterly dependant on one other state, then chances are you do not really need another entity.

All in all,

that turned out longer than I envisioned it to be become. But I hope it is of any help to any React coders who managed the absolute basics and now are prone to the next-level pitfalls.

The good news is that after a certain bunch of hardships, there is rarely the case of even more surprises. So, manage your state and effects responsibly, especially the asynchronous ones, and the rest are practices that apply for any software development.

Or am I misled?