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Tips And Tricks That You Should Pay Attention To When Writing React Codes

Herbert Huffner

When You First Start Coding As A Programmer, Your Code Will Bear Little Resemblance In Terms Of Grammar And Syntax To The Code You’ll Write A Few Years Later, As You Gain Experience, Learn About Design Patterns, And Look At Other People’s codes.

You will learn what principles to follow to write efficient and accurate codes. In addition, by searching the Internet and finding the best design patterns, you will be able to interact with team members more easily.

In this article, you will learn about some of React’s best coding techniques and patterns. Patterns that help you write clear, readable code away from common mistakes.

Three main challenges that developers face

First, let’s go over every React developer’s challenges: maintainability, lack of mastery of basic concepts, and extensibility.

Maintainability

Maintainability is directly related to reusability. Early software had few components that made their implementation process faster and easier to maintain, but as the needs started to grow, added more complex features to the software.

This issue made it harder to maintain the programs.

Typically, developers design or use different components during their careers, each designed for specific purposes. For example, JSX uses a lot of conditional rendering (ternary operators and simple && operators), class names used conditionally, or a component with a comprehensive switch statement.

Additionally, there are many prop and state values, each providing different output.

There is nothing wrong with these techniques, but knowing when to use a component correctly and not to use more than one component to do different things is essential.

One of the most prominent problems programmers face is understanding the functionality of a component. The more complex a member has and provides different results (multidirectional), the more difficult it is to maintain its syntactic composition.

The only way to overcome this problem is a lot of practice constantly reviewing projects and editing code that may need editing.

Developers are not interested in unit testing and functional tests, and most try to ignore this part. However, testing different modules of an application helps you design software that is easiest for the end user to use. For this purpose, you should use techniques such as Unit Test for technical evaluation of codes used in applications.

Lack of mastery of fundamental concepts

Another problem for developers working with React is not mastering the React syntax. Unfortunately, some people rush to intermediate or advanced concepts without having a solid foundation in the basic concepts. Lack of mastery of fundamental concepts creates various problems for developers. For example, you can use the life cycle of different components only when you are thoroughly familiar with them.

Scalability

As we mentioned, scalability is closely related to maintainability and is a general and essential rule in the software world. One thing you should pay attention to is that building great software is not limited to user experience, clean code patterns, or intelligent architecture, and scalability is a fundamental principle to pay attention to because it directly impacts software quality. Various metrics increase the scalability of the software. Suppose you pay attention to maintainability and scalability when building applications, deploying software modules and organizing the project structure. In that case, you will write clean and readable source codes that will shorten the time to revise or add new modules.

How to learn React

One of the most critical challenges that people have when entering the world of web programming is how to learn new things. In the following, we will examine the best ways to learn React.

Learn React step by step

One of the biggest problems for those interested in learning React and other programming languages ​​is the fast learning process. A continuous and slow learning approach is the best way to discover topics like programming. Each training session should focus on one to three points so that the concepts are fully embedded in the mind. Unfortunately, some schools try to bombard those interested in programming topics with information in a short period of two months, each session lasting more than two to three hours. An approach that ends up learning very few things. The same goes for learning React. You can’t build a skyscraper on a loose foundation and expect it to be solid.

If you want to learn React fundamentally, you should start learning JavaScript. It may seem obvious to some of you, but I’ve seen developers jump into learning intermediate or advanced React concepts without understanding the basics. Be sure that if you follow this advice, you will be successful.

Knowing the basics alone is not enough. Knowing what React does in the background is very important. If you want to become a good React developer, you need to gain a solid understanding of the tool you’re using. Learning React architecture helps you describe the projects you design for clients in plain language.

Also, less time is spent debugging the program when you encounter problems. Also, remember that you can’t learn everything in theory, and you’ll need to spend a lot of time coding to understand the issues that different projects face.

What should we learn to have a solid foundation in React?

One of the most important topics to focus on learning is Hooks, as they have become an essential React-related standard and are used everywhere, especially in conjunction with third-party React packages. Of course, other components are beneficial, including useState and use effect, useMemo, callback, and use.

In general, to learn React, it is recommended to think about learning the following concepts:

How do you build clean, efficient, and maintainable interactive components?

There is a big difference between a good and a great programmer. A good programmer writes code that runs, and the final program doesn’t produce an error, but a great programmer writes optimized code that uses the least amount of system resources, and the final program runs in a short amount of time. To write efficient React code, you need to use coding best practices so that your team members can easily understand the code you write. For this purpose, you should write a style guide (Style Guide), which includes instructions and tips that you should follow when coding.

As a React developer, follow these principles to write highly maintainable and readable code:

A style guide is an excellent way to code and coding best practices to ensure that your team is knowledgeable about essential topics.

Now we come to the critical question, what methods should React programmers use for clean, efficient, and highly maintainable coding? In the following, we mention some essential principles.

Use an excellent structure to organize files and folders.

Organizing the files and folders of a React application is essential for maintainability and scalability. A folder should create according to the program’s size and the team. When creating the folder, please consider the critical point that the project will grow over time and many changes will apply to it, so it is better to estimate this field.

Organize a project’s imports

If you have experience working with React, you may have seen files that contain many import statements. Also, some applications have many dependencies that import libraries and frameworks into the project that you need to access some internal components such as functions, styles, etc. In such a situation, you may have something like the following:

import React, { useState, useEffect, use callback } from “react”;

import Typography from “@material-ui/core/Typography”;

import Divider from “@material-ui/core/Divider”;

import Title from “../components/Title”;

import Navigation from “../components/Navigation”;

import DialogActions from “@material-ui/core/DialogActions”

import { getServiceURL } from ‘../../utils/getServiceURL’”;

import Grid from “@material-ui/core/Grid”;

import Paragraph from “../components/Paragraph”;

import { sectionTitleEnum } from “../../constants”;

import { useSelector, useDispatch } from “react-redux”;

import Box from “@material-ui/core/Box”;

As you can see, this method of importing dependencies into a project is not structured at all. As a React developer, you must put imports and their related dependencies together so that everything takes a structured form. The following code snippet illustrates this:

import React, { useState, useEffect, use callback } from “react”;

import Typography from “@material-ui/core/Typography”;

import Divider from “@material-ui/core/Divider”;

import Title from “../components/Title”;

import Navigation from “../components/Navigation”;

import DialogActions from “@material-ui/core/DialogActions”

import { getServiceURL } from ‘../../utils/getServiceURL’”;

import Grid from “@material-ui/core/Grid”;

import Paragraph from “../components/Paragraph”;

import { sectionTitleEnum } from “../../constants”;

import { useSelector, useDispatch } from “react-redux”;

import Box from “@material-ui/core/Box”;

The clearer the organization, the easier it will be to distinguish internal and external libraries and frameworks from each other. Professional developers divide the structure of imports into three different parts: pre-built (like react), external (third-party modules), and internal.

Learn patterns around different components

To ensure that your code does not face problems such as a lack of extensibility and maintainability, you should increase your knowledge about React components’ various patterns. Mastery of practices means you know when to use which way for a problem.

Use a linter and its policies.

Lint or linter is a static code analysis tool that flags programming errors, bugs, styling errors, and suboptimal structures. Linter not only helps you organize imports and dependencies but also helps you write better code. When you use the create-react-app tool, ESLint comes pre-configured, but you can customize it and add your directives to its rule set.

A linter evaluates the JavaScript code you’re writing and alerts you to the mistakes you’re most likely making while coding. Following the rules and policies is an essential principle you should pay attention to when using a linter. Of course, it’s possible to disable regulations, in general, for a single line of code or an entire file, but we recommend that you don’t do this if you’re writing structured code.

Another great benefit that linters give you is style evaluation. This feature becomes especially valuable when working in a team. For this reason, we recommend learning how to use ESLint and JSPrettify.

Test your code

Some React developers shy away from code testing, seeing it as a pointless task, which may be trivial for small projects, but essential for large projects. Code testing shows that you are a professional in your work and can design high-quality software. Professional React programmers use three methods of unit testing (Unit Test), integration test (Integration Test), and questioning (End-To-End). When you are writing tests, you have to think about different things.

What should a particular component do, and what important things should I consider when testing the code? Can I optimize a member to serve only one purpose?

Tests can also be used as a documentation mechanism so that a React developer looking at your application can understand what different parts of the software are supposed to do and how they work.

Integrate TypeScript or at least use default tools and basic types

Using TypeScript has many advantages, the most important of which are static type checking, better code completion in the integrated development environment (IntelliSense), improved coding experience, and early identification of type errors while coding.

Use lazy-loading and code-splitting techniques.

Packaging means checking imported files and merging them into a single file called a bundle. If you have experience working with JavaScript and React, you are most likely familiar with bundling. Most React programs bundle files using Webpack, Rollup, or Browserify. Next, this package can place on a web page. The above approach is a great technique, but it has a big problem; As the web-based application grows, so does the software package, mainly when you use great third-party libraries like three.js.

Some developers try to solve this problem by loading a whole package, even when only some code is needed. The problem with the above method is that it negatively affects the program’s performance because it will take a lot of time to load the program.

A technique called Code Splitting should be used To prevent the above problems. In the above method, they are divided according to the sections and small pieces that are needed. Tools like Webpack, Rollup, and Browserify work based on this technique.

A significant advantage of the above method is that it allows you to create different bundles and load them dynamically. In this case, only the needed sections are loaded, which significantly improves the speed and performance of the program.

Use try-catch to handle out-of-bounds errors.

This technique is effective for detecting errors that may occur in asynchronous calls. Suppose we have received a user’s profile data from an application programming interface and want to show them inside a profile component (Profile Component).

const UserProfile = ({ userId }) => {

    const [isLoading, setIsLoading] = useState(true)

    const [profileData, setProfileData] = useState({})

    effect(() => {

        // Separate function to make use of async

        const getUserDataAsync = async () => {

            try {

                // Fetch user data from API

                const userData = await Axios.get(`/users/${userId}`)

                // Throw error if user data is false (will be caught by catch)

                if (!userData) {

                    throw new Error (“No user data found”)

                }

                // If user data is truthful, update the state

                setProfileData(userData.profile)

            } catch(error) {

                // Log any caught error in the logging service

                errorService.log({ error })

                // Update state

                setProfileData(null)

            } finally {

                // Reset loading state in any case

                sets loading(false)

            }

        }

        getUserDataAsync()

    }, [])

    if (isLoading) {

        return <div>Loading …</div>

    }

    if (!profileData) {

        return <ErrorUI />

    }

    return (

        <div>

            User Profile

        </div>

    )

}

When the component is installed, it sends a GET request to the API to get the user data for the userId associated with the props. The try-catch block helps catch any errors that may occur during an API call. For example, this error could be a 404 or 500 response from the API.

In this case, the catch block can receive the error code as a parameter. We can import it into our login service and update the state accordingly to show a custom error UI.

last word

As you can see, the world of React is surrounded by tricks and tips that will help you write structured and clear code. There are other coding patterns that we did not mention in this article. Practices that help improve the security of your code remove non-HTML attributes and use components like useState. For more information about other tricks, we suggest you refer to the following article.

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