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Mastering Input State Management in React
Today’s web applications are more interactive and data-driven than ever, making input field management a crucial aspect of dynamic webpage creation. In React, “input state” refers to the current state of input elements, including tags, checkboxes, radio buttons, and other native form elements. This article explores how React manages input states and discusses various strategies for handling state changes.
Understanding Controlled and Uncontrolled Components
Native HTML input elements, such as input, select, and others, maintain their own state and mutate it whenever the user interacts with them. However, this isn’t the case with React. Instead, React keeps the input state in the component itself, passing it down to the input element and mutating the stored state using a setter function pattern.
What Are Controlled Components?
A controlled component is when the component state is the single source of truth, and data flows from the parent component to the element. This approach ensures that you maintain the state in the component itself, but outside the element. Controlled components are typically easier to debug, and the React team recommends this approach in most use cases.
What Are Uncontrolled Components?
An uncontrolled component, on the other hand, manages its state internally. While this approach can be useful for quick UI prototyping and porting HTML code to a React codebase, it’s generally not recommended.
Exploring Input State with onFocus and onBlur Events
In addition to onChange and onSubmit, there are various other native HTML form attributes and events that make managing input cases easier. Let’s explore two types: onFocus and onBlur events.
How onFocus Events Work with Input Elements
onFocus is a native HTML event that triggers only when the target element is in focus. You can leverage this event to build UI interactions such as changing outline colors, providing tooltip feedback to users, and more.
How onBlur Events Work with Input Elements
onBlur works as a counterpart to onFocus events — it gets triggered when an element goes out of focus. By pairing these two event attributes together, you can track when an element is in focus and when it goes out of focus.
Leveraging Third-Party Libraries to Handle Input State in React
Instead of reinventing the wheel, it’s best to utilize an already-built, production-ready form and input management solution for more complex data handling. Popular libraries such as React Hook Form, Formik, and React Final Form are very efficient when it comes to managing complex use cases.
Building Forms with Formik
Formik removes the pain points of complex input data handling scenarios, such as error handling, warning, and pattern checking. By doing the bare minimum, Formik provides high-level APIs to manage custom error messages, trigger texts when fields are being touched, and format data before sending it to the backend API.
Conclusion
Handling input states in React can be challenging, but with the right approach, following standards such as using controlled components, React makes it easier to handle data. By leveraging native events such as onFocus, onBlur, and more, building forms can be very scalable and easy to debug.