frontend-bootcamp/step2-04/demo/README.md

Step 2.4 - React Context (Demo)

Lessons | Exercise | Demo

In this step, we describe some problems we encounter when creating a more complex application.

We will solve these problems with the React Context API. The Context API consists of:

1. Provider component
2. Consuming context from a Class Component
3. Consuming context from a Functional Component

---

React represents a single component like this:

(props) => view;

In a real application, these functions are composed. It looks more like this:

Problems in a Complex Application

1. Data needs to be passed down from component to component via props. Even when some components do not need to know about some data. This is a problem called props drilling

2. There is a lack of coordination of changes that can happen to the data

Even in our simple application, we saw this problem. For example, <TodoList> has this props interface:

interface TodoListProps {
  complete: (id: string) => void;
  remove: (id: string) => void;
  todos: Store['todos'];
  filter: FilterTypes;
  edit: (id: string, label: string) => void;
}

All of these props are not used, except to be passed down to a child Component, TodoListItem:

<TodoListItem todos="{todos}" complete="{complete}" remove="{remove}" edit="{edit}" />

Context API

Let's solve these problems with the React Context API. context is React's way to share data from components to their descendant children components without explicitly passing down through props at every level of the tree. React context is created by calling createContext() with some initial data:

// To create a completed empty context
const TodoContext = React.createContext(undefined);

Now that we have a TodoContext stuffed with some initial state, we will wrap TodoApp component with TodoContext.Provider so that it can provide data to all its children:

class TodoApp extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <TodoContext.Provider
        value={{
          ...this.state,
          addTodo={this._addTodo},
          setFilter={this._setFilter},
          /* same goes for remove, complete, and clear */
        }}>
        <div>
          <TodoHeader />
          <TodoList />
          <TodoFooter />
        </div>
      </TodoContext.Provider>
    );
  }
}

Inside the children components, like the <TodoHeader> component, the value can be access from the component's context prop like this:

class TodoHeader extends React.Component {
  render() {
    // Step 1: use the context prop
    return <div>Filter is {this.context.filter}</div>;
  }
}

// Step 2: be sure to set the contextType property of the component class
TodoHeader.contextType = TodoContext;

If you're using the functional component syntax, you can access the context with the useContext() function (we are using the function passed down inside the context, in this case):

const TodoFooter = props => {
  const context = useContext(TodoContext);
  return (
    <div>
      <button onClick={context.clear()}>Clear Completed</button>
    </div>
  );
};