baintonw / react-children

Introduction to React Children

Why do we need children?

In HTML, encapsulating several bits of UI can be as easy as wrapping them in a single element. For example:

<div class="container">
  <h1>Hello, I'm in a container!</h1>
  <p>I'm a description!</p>
</div>

In the above code, the h1 and p tags are direct children of the div, meaning that they are rendered within div. In other words, they are part of the div.

In React, you might create a reusable version of this HTML by doing the following:

function Header (props) {
  return (
    <div class="container">
      <h1>{props.header}</h1>
      <p>{props.description}</p>
    </div>
  )
}

The header and description props help us make the Header component reusable, as seen here:

ReactDOM.render(
  <div>
    <Header header="Hello, I'm in a container!", description="I'm a description!" />
    <Header header="I'm another container", description="Whoa that's weird!" />
    <Header header="A third container!", description="Cray cray" />
  </div>,
  document.getElementById('root')
)

This is great when we want UI that has the same structure with different text/attributes. We can even use conditional rendering to help us choose when to render parts of the UI. Not bad! But consider the following HTML:

<div class="container">
  <h1>Hello, I'm in a container!</h1>
  <p>I'm a description!</p>
</div>
<div class="container">
  <strong>Image description</strong>
  <div class="image-wrapper"/>
    <img src="img/src" alt="text"/>
  </div>
</div>
<div class="container">
  <h4>People</h4>
  <ul>
    <li>Evans "Wangtron" Wang</li>
    <li>Andrew "Chrome Boi" Cohn </li>
    <li>Tashawn "Thursdays" Williams</li>
    <li>Alex "Friggin'" Griffith</li>
  </ul>
</div>

In this example, we have 3 divs each with the same class name, but entirely different children and internal structure. props won't help us here: each div has such radically different content. From what we know of React, we would be forced to write 3 different components, each with the same wrapping div but entirely different contents. Wouldn't it be nice if you could write one component that can keep much of the same external structure but render different components internally? Enter the children prop.

How do we make children?

So far you've seen components rendered like this:

function Example (props){
  return(
    <div>
      {props.exampleProp}
    <div>
  )
}

<Example exampleProp="example value" />

However React allows you to use your components as wrappers like most HTML elements:

<Example exampleProp="example value">
  <h1>Example header!</h1>
  <p>Some example text</p>
</Example>

If you were to use the above definition of the Example component, you would observe no difference at all: the h1 and p would not be rendered. However, if you inspect the props in Example, you'll notice a new prop has been added: children. A closer look at this prop reveals that this props contains an array, and at each element of the array is a component! In this case, you'll see an h1 and a p tag, in that order. Rendering these children is the same as rendering any array of components:

function Example (props){
  return(
    <div>
      {props.exampleProp}
      {props.children}
    <div>
  )
}

And voila! You have a component that is able to render its children! Any valid JSX elements, including your own components and nested JSX elements, can be used as children.

An example of working children

To run our example, run npm install && npm start

You'll notice that our App component renders 2 Container components, each with distinct children. Take a look at the code for Container: spend some time figuring out what each prop does. (Note: defaultProps allows a developer to specify a value for a prop in the case that you don't pass any values for that prop). You'll notice there are 5 props: direction, header, textPosition, and children. We've already discussed children, but try to figure out what the others do!