Use Prop Collections with Render Props

Kent C. Dodds
InstructorKent C. Dodds
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Published 6 years ago
Updated 5 years ago

Sometimes you have common use cases that require common props to be applied to certain elements. You can collect these props into an object for users to simply apply to their elements and we'll see how to do that in this lesson.

Instructor: [00:00] We have a switch component that looks nice, and then we have this button component that can also control the state. There's one problem with this button, and that's that it's not very accessible. It's missing this aria-expanded prop.

[00:11] I'm going to go ahead and bring that up here, and we'll say aria-expanded on that one. Now, this is accessible, that's accessible. That's nice, but I'm going to go ahead and actually move this up, because we're going to be spreading the props anyway.

[00:25] I can put this prop right up here, and now we actually have two switches, or two buttons, that control the toggle state that have two props that are identical. Often when you're using render props in this way, you're going to have certain elements that you expect people to render, and you want to have certain attributes or props applied to those elements.

[00:47] To make the common use cases easier, you can provide a collection of props that people can apply to certain elements. In our use case, we are creating a toggle button. It's probably really common for people to create buttons that they want to have aria-expanded applied to, and onClick.

[01:03] We can create this collection of props that we could have people just spread across the element that they're going to be rendering for the toggling. I'm going to go ahead and togglerProps. With togglerProps, we can just cut this out, get togglerProps.

[01:20] We'll do the same for our button, and then we'll go ahead and inside of our render call, we'll add a togglerProps property. Then we'll have aria-expanded is this.state.on, and onClick is this.toggle. Now, everything's working exactly as it was before.

[01:40] Now, people don't have to worry about whether or not their button is going to be accessible with regard to the aria-expanded attribute, it's just going to be there for them. All they have to do is apply the togglerProps on the element that they're going to be rendering.

[01:53] This pattern is called prop collections, and it allows you to take common use cases, collect the props that are applicable to those, allow users to just use those props and apply them to the elements that are relevant.

Vishal
Vishal
~ 4 years ago

Keep it tidy

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