Mastering Advanced React Hooks: Elevate Your Functional Components to the Next Level

Photo by Fili Santillán on Unsplash

Introduction

Are you prepared to increase your React skills? Consider using advanced React hooks! You can add state and lifecycle methods to functional components using these strong tools to make them more dynamic and interactive.

Prerequisites

Understanding the concepts below will greatly help:

1. a solid grasp of React’s fundamentals, including components, state, and props.
2. usage of simple hooks like useState and useEffect.
3. basic understanding of JavaScript objects, arrays, and functions.

useReducer

Let’s begin with the useReducer hook first. You can manage complex state logic with this hook and lessen the need for drilling props. It accepts a reducer function and an initial state, returns the current state, and provides a dispatch function to update the state.

Here’s a straightforward illustration of how to manage a counter using the useReducer hook:

const reducer = (state, action) => {
  switch(action.type) {
    case 'increment':
      return { count: state.count + 1 };
    case 'decrement':
      return { count: state.count - 1 };
    default:
      return state;
  }
}

const Counter = () => {
  const [state, dispatch] = useReducer(reducer, { count: 0 });

  return (
    <>
      <p>{state.count}</p>
      <button onClick={() => dispatch({ type: 'increment' })}>Increment</button>
      <button onClick={() => dispatch({ type: 'decrement' })}>Decrement</button>
    </>
  );
}

useMemo

UseMemo is a powerful hook that you should surely have in your toolbox. This hook allows you to optimize your component’s performance by only executing expensive computations again when specific values change. Your application’s performance will improve, and your component will prevent unnecessary re-renders.

Here’s an example of using useMemo to only calculate the total price of a shopping cart when the quantity of items changes:

const ShoppingCart = ({ items }) => {
  const totalPrice = useMemo(() => {
    let total = 0;
    items.forEach(item => {
      total += item.price * item.quantity;
    });
    return total;
  }, [items]);

  return (
    <p>Total price: {totalPrice}</p>
  );
}

useCallback

The useCallback hook comes last, this hook is pretty similar to useMemo, except it instead returns a memoized callback function. A memoized callback function is a function that keeps track of the outcomes of earlier calls and returns the previously cached result when the same input is supplied once again. Reducing the need to repeatedly compute the outcome of an expensive operation can help optimize an application's performance. This can be helpful for improving the functionality of child components or event handlers that rely on particular values.

Here is an illustration of how to only construct a new event handler function when a person’s name changes by using useCallback:

const PersonList = ({ people }) => {
  const handleClick = useCallback(name => {
    console.log(`Clicked on ${name}`);
  }, [people]);

  return (
    <ul>
      {people.map(person => (
        <Person key={person.name} name={person.name} onClick={handleClick} />
      ))}
    </ul>
  );
}

const Person = React.memo(({ name, onClick }) => (
  <li onClick={() => onClick(name)}>{name}</li>
));

The functionality and performance of your functional components can be significantly improved by using advanced React hooks like useReducer, useMemo, and useCallback. You may create more productive and efficient applications by integrating these technologies into your workflow. The choices are unlimited, so don’t be hesitant to try different things until you discover the perfect fit for your project.