This lesson will teach you the basics of setting properties (props) in your React components. As stated in Thinking in React, props are how we pass data around in React. We will take a look at what propTypes
and defaultProps
do for us in React.
[00:00] We can pass data into our components by using what's called props. Here, I've created a prop called text. This looks a lot like passing an attribute into an html element. I'm going to set that to a string of, "This is the prop text."
[00:18] In our component, we can access our props by interpolating with curly brackets, this.props, and then, the name of the prop that we're looking for. In our case, it's txt. Save that and we can see, "This is the prop text." Now, outside of JSX, we don't need to interpolate that, so, I can say, let text equal is props.txt, and then in our JSX, I can just use that variable name txt.
[00:48] Just so we can see that change in the browser, I'm going to update our value to, "This is the prop value," and we can see that there in our browser. Now, we can define the properties that we're going to be looking for in our component by adding a property to our component called PropTypes.
[01:05] This is going to be an object where each key is the name of the property, and each key's value is the type of value that we're looking for. If we're text, I can say I'm looking for react.PropTypes.string. I'm going to create one more here which can be called cat. I'm going to say react.PropTypes.number is what we're looking for. In this case, we're looking for a number. I can save that. Everything's going to work just fine.
[01:29] However, on each of these PropTypes, we can add an isRequired to it. When I save that, everything's going to work fine, but we can see here in the console that the prop cat is marked as required in app, but its value is undefined.
[01:45] If I jump back over to our component usage, and say, cat equals, we'll set that to five, everything's working again. We're not getting that error. We can also set a series of default properties by adding a property to our component called defaultProps.
[02:03] Again, this is going to be an object where each key is the property. I'm going to set our default for text to, "This is the default text." I'm going to save that. What we're going to see is that the value that was passed into our component actually overwrites the default.
[02:20] Once I clear that out, we get our, "This is the default text," which is the default property that we set for our component.
I cant see any warning when a field is required and i have the same code as the video, why?
What version of react are you using? I believe its not required in the newer versions of react.
I cant see any warning when a field is required and i have the same code as the video, why?
I have the same issue. Having looked on StackOverflow, the reason seems to be that only the development version of React shows the warnings for isRequired
violations. The JSbin for this tutorial uses the production version- react.min.js
, instead of the development version- react.js
.
So, switch this line:
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/0.13.2/react.min.js"></script>
For this line:
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/0.13.2/react.js"></script>
I was pretty confused following along with this lesson having started with the first tutorial video in this series. That video has you set up a React environment and in the main.js file of that app is the line:
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById('app'));
That line is apparently at odds with the ReactDOM.render line in the tutorial above. This caused my webpage to show nothing at all.
Unless I missed something in the tutorials after the first one, maybe you guys should make it more clear what to do. But again, I may have missed that.
Good catch. I'll see about updating this lesson, I believe it's the only one that deviates from that pattern. main.js in this case should simply be:
import App from './App';
How are you getting the auto completion from reactTypes?
For anyone else getting a fatal error from propTypes, see this post https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43302963/how-to-fix-react-15-5-3-proptypes-deprecated-warning-when-using-create-react-app
Basically deprecation.
React.PropTypes are deprecated in React 16, this example doesn't work.
Fix: import PropTypes from 'prop-types'; ... txt: PropTypes.string
etc.
React.PropTypes is deprectated.
After react v15.5, instead of accessing PropTypes from main React object ( React.PropTypes ), install prop-types package and import it in your app.
https://reactjs.org/blog/2017/04/07/react-v15.5.0.html#migrating-from-react.proptypes
Worth noting that React.PropTypes have now been removed from React core, so you need to install them as a separate package that doesn't come with create-react-app
. The new workflow requires installing PropTypes package with:
$ npm i --save prop-types
And then importing PropTypes with import PropTypes from 'prop-types'
and using PropTypes
instead of React.PropTypes
in your code.
React.PropTypes.string is throwing an error. TypeError: Cannot read property 'string' of undefined
@Joe, The App.propTypes and App.defaultProps does not work. Has this changed in the latest version when you use create-react-app to setup.
Might want to update the lesson or put in a warning. I got the following warning in the console when following along. "React.PropTypes is deprecated since React 15.5.0, use the npm module prop-types instead."
The content need to be updated as React.PropTypes is deprecated since React 15.5.0, use the npm module prop-types instead react/no-deprecated
The updated code for App.js should be
import React from "react";
import PropTypes from "prop-types";
class App extends React.Component{
render(){
let txt = this.props.txt
return( <h1>{txt}</h1> )
}
}
App.propTypes = {
txt: PropTypes.string,
cat: PropTypes.number.isRequired
}
export default App
import React from 'react';
import PropTypes from 'prop-types';
class App extends React.Component {
render() {
let txt = this.props.txt;
return (
<div>
<h1>{txt}</h1>
</div>
);
}
}
App.propTypes = {
txt: PropTypes.string,
cat: PropTypes.number.isRequired
};
App.defaultProps = {
txt: 'this is the default txt'
};
export default App;
The HTML code for this lesson does not have a <script> tag to include JSXTransformer.js. That was included in the preceding lessons, and I had to add it to get this lesson to work on my machine. Otherwise I just get a blank screen in the browser.
However, I see that on jsbin.com your code for this lesson is working just fine without including JSXTransformer.js. Why do I need to include JSXTransformer.js but you don't?