Designing simpler React components

When using React to build large-scale applications, a number of frameworks have flourished to easily manage state, data-fetching, routing, and other application-level concerns. We’re not going to talk about that — instead, we’ll focus on another essential piece: how do you design React components for use in a large application and have it scale?

A goal to strive for when using any framework or language is simplicity. Over time, it is the simpler application that is more maintainable, readable, testable, and performant. React is no exception, and we found that one of the best ways to manifest simplicity is by striving for functional purity in components, and by developing patterns that achieve this purity by default. Purity leads to more isolated and inherently simpler components, thereby bringing about a less braided and simpler system.

This is something we’ve thought a lot about at Asana — before we started using React, we had been building our in-house functionally reactive framework, Luna, since 2008. In iterating on this framework and building our web application, we’ve learned what worked and what caused long-term problems (read more). Through that, we’ve developed a series of overarching design principles that can be applied everywhere but particularly in React.

Immutable data representation

When your data representation is mutable, then you’ll find it very difficult to maintain simple components. Individual components will become more complex by detecting and handling the transition states when data changes, rather than handling this at a higher-level component dedicated to re-fetching the data. Additionally, in React, immutable structures often lead to better performance: when data changes in a mutable representation, you’ll likely need to rely on React’s virtual DOM to determine whether components should update; alternatively, in an immutable representation, you can use a basic strict equality check to determine whether an update should occur.

Any time we have deviated from this and used a mutable object in props, it has resulted in regret and refactoring.

See here for more general benefits of using immutable data structures.

Make liberal use of pure functions

A pure function is a function whose return value is solely determined by its input values, without dependence on global state or causing any side effects. In components, we often have complicated behavior that aids but is not directly tied to our rendering. Use pure helper functions to move this logic outside of the component, so that the component has fewer responsibilities and lower complexity. Additionally, this logic can be tested in an isolated way, and is re-usable in other components. If you notice common sets of these helper functions, then denote them as such by organizing them into sets of modules.We’ve encountered two main classes of these which occur in almost all of our components:

1. Data model helpers to derive a result from one or more objects (for example: to determine whether a user is currently on vacation)

2. Mutation helpers to perform client- and server-side mutations in response to user actions (for example: to heart a task).

Use pure components, avoiding impure pitfalls

A pure component is a React component whose render function is pure (solely determined by props and state). The default behavior in React is to always re-render the entire component tree, even if props/state do not change. This is incredibly inefficient, and React suggests overriding shouldComponentUpdate to take advantage of pure render functions in the component’s lifecycle. This offers an enormous performance boost and increased simplicity, so you should consider doing this early-on.

When using pure components (overriding shouldComponentUpdate), there is no verification that you actually implement your components to be pure. So, it’s possible to accidentally write a component that is not pure, which will cause reactivity problems and show stale data to the user. We’ll discuss two of these “impure pitfalls.”

Globals

Using globals in a component means that the component is no longer pure, as it depends on data outside of props and state. If you rely on a global for rendering or in any of the component’s lifecycle methods, then you won’t achieve correctness and reactivity. We’ve found it immensely helpful to avoid using globals like the Document or Window, and instead pass these as props to the components which use them. We do this by creating a Services object, and by having each component declare in an interface which services it relies on. Through this, components can maintain purity and be independent of the global namespace.

Render Callbacks

A now-antipattern that used to be quite prevalent for us is a render callback:a function passed as a prop to a component, which allows that component to render something. A common use-case of a render callback was to allow a child to render something using data it did not receive in props. For example, if we wanted to have a generalized component that could render many types of child components, we would pass the component a callback to render the child.

Unfortunately, render callbacks are inherently impure because they can use whatever variables its function has closed on. So, because of our assumption of pure components, if any of the outside environment changes then our component would not re-render. Let’s see this in a code snippet.

In this snippet, ParentComponent passes a render callback to ChildComponent, and that render callback uses someObject from props. Since ChildComponent uses this function for its rendering behavior, then it will not re-render if someObject changes.

Luckily, you can avoid using a render callback in one of three ways, depending on your constraints, and each allows us to keep our pure component assumption.

Alternative 1 Pass all information needed for rendering to the child component, and have that child render the component directly.

We achieve the same rendered output by having ChildComponent render SomeOtherComponent itself. This works well if the additional props do not cause excess re-rendering, and do not break any contextual abstraction boundary in the component.

Alternative 2 Render the component in its entirety and pass that to the child component

In cases that ParentComponent has all of the information needed to render SomeOtherComponent, we can just pass it down as a prop to the ChildComponent.

Alternative 3 Render the component partially, pass the ReactElement to the child component, and use React’s cloneElement to inject the remaining props.

This alternative is great for cases where neither ParentComponent nor ChildComponent have the full information needed to render SomeOtherComponent, so it shares the responsibility. While this may seem more complicated than the above two alternatives, it has a lot of desirable properties. In the next section, we’ll dig into a real world example to make it more concrete.

Divide components and use the injector pattern to maintain separation of concerns

Composition is an immensely useful pattern in React for achieving separation of concerns. Many great philosophies around this have developed, such as dividing components between presentational and container components. However, for some high-level components, such as a general component for drag-and-drop, composition necessitated either use of a render callback or added complexity. In such cases, we found the aforementioned injector pattern helpful.

Example from Asana: Simplifying the Task List rowA core component in Asana is the Task List, which allows a user to see all of the tasks in a project. The component for a single row in this list has many responsibilities: it displays information (such as the task assignee), it can be a section or a task, and it can be dragged and dropped to re-order. Following the principle of composition, we divided the task row to achieve smaller and simpler components, and composed them together.

As part of this, we wanted to create a general component that handled all of the drag-and-drop logic, which could be composed with a task row. This would mean that a task row could be completely agnostic to drag-and-drop, and all of that logic would be contained within a new component that could be agnostic to its rendered child.

With such a design, we would be able to compose a DraggableRowContainer and TaskRow to make a draggable task row. Each of these two components would not need to know about the other, and a TaskList component could utilize them to render its task list. For example:

However, we found this difficult to accomplish without introducing a render callback or complicating the DOM hierarchy, because the DraggableRowContainer needed to add to DOM nodes (in this case, adding class names). A solution could have been to use a render callback, but that broke our purity assumption.

Instead, we were able to use the injector pattern. DraggableRowContainer would clone its child (a TaskRow), and “inject” props to the child to enable drag-and-drop. This did not introduce complexity to TaskRow: it could still render purely based on props, and did not need to be conscious of drag functionality. The TaskRow props would just need to adhere to a certain interface (in this case, expecting a class name to add styling on drag hover). Therefore, our task row has fewer responsibilities, we have a re-usable DraggableRowContainer component, and our DOM hierarchy is unchanged.

The injection pattern has proved useful in our application, particularly when used to create general abstraction components (drag-and-drop, loading data, and so on). TypeScript gives us compile-time assurance that the passed-in element can indeed be injected with a given property, and the cloned element can execute its React lifecycle methods without worry.

Conclusion

While this is just a short list of patterns to consider, and they will certainly not guarantee a simple and scalable application, we have found them immensely helpful in approaching component design. Incorporating functional purity in every component — through use of immutable data representations, pure functions, pure components, and eliminating impure pitfalls—has allowed us to develop large parts of our application in React while maintaining simplicity and performance. In all, though, the best principle is to continue to take time to reflect along the way and uncover new opportunities to simplify.