[Standard] Binding functions in react components

Owner: Jean Faverie

Note: Please create an issue or even a Pull Request with your feedback, typo correction.

Context

During this standard, we will take an example from the egghead react native tutorial when launching an event with a submit button.

The tutorial does it the old ES5 way when we should better use the ES6 way (with arrow functions).

Prerequisites (~4 min)

• Have react-native installed (npm i -g react-native-cli) (~2 min)
• Have a react-native projet (react-native init <project name) (~2 min)

Checks

Bad Examples :

When using the TextInput onChange, the tutorial tells you to define an handleChange function this way (CAUTION, this is a BAD EXAMPLE) :

class Test extends Component {
  // ...
  handleChange(event) {
    this.setState({
      username: event.nativeEvent.text,
    });
  }
  // ...
  render() {
    return (
      <TextInput
        onChange={this.handleChange.bind(this)}
      />
    )
  }
}

• This is bad in two ways : performance and syntax.

• Performance : the first problem here is we use bind at every onChange event, which is very costly. What we coud do is (still not optimal) :

class Test extends Component {
  // ...
  handleChange(event) {
    this.setState({
      username: event.nativeEvent.text,
    }).bind(this);
  }
  // ...
  render() {
    return (
      <TextInput
        onChange={this.handleChange}
      />
    )
  }
}

we improve our performance, as we only bind at the creation of the class. This is not ideal though.

1. The bind function is used to be sure to use the good context (the this of the class, not the one of the handleChange function).

Good Examples :

We can improve the syntax by using an arrow function, which has no proper context and uses the context of the class (you can use tis example).

class Test extends Component {
  // ...
  handleChange = event => {
    this.setState({
      username: event.nativeEvent.text,
    });
  };
  // ...
  render() {
    return (
      <TextInput
        onChange={this.handleChange}
      />
    )
  }
}

The this inside the arrow function handleChange now refers to the Test class.