react-class

A carefully crafted base class for all your React components

Features

• auto-bind methods
• avoid boilerplate with default style and default class name

Install

$ npm install react-class --save

Usage

Instead of extending React.Component you have to extend the class exported by react-class.

import Component from 'react-class'

class MyApp extends Component {

  render(){
    // you have to call prepareProps in order to get defaultClassName
    // and defaultStyle applied to props
    var props = this.prepareProps(this.props)

    return <div {...props} onClick={this.onClick}>
      //onClick is auto-bound to "this", so you can keep your code dry
    </div>
  }

  onClick(){
    console.log(this)
  }
}

MyApp.defaultProps = {
  defaultStyle: {
    border: '2px solid red'
  },
  defaultClassName: 'myapp'
}

So you can use <MyApp style={{color: 'blue'}} className="main" /> and get defaultProps.defaultClassName always applied to your component and defaultProps.defaultStyle merged into props.style. Of course, any colliding style you specify in props.style will override the one in defaultProps.defaultStyle

The result of

<MyApp style={{color: 'blue'}} className="main" />

is a div with the following:

<div style="color: blue; border: 2px solid red" class="myapp main">
</div>

prepareProps

To get defaultProps.defaultStyle and defaultProps.defaultClassName applied on the props object, remember to call prepareProps

var props = this.prepareProps(this.props)

All it does is the following:

function prepareProps(thisProps){
  var props = assign({}, thisProps)

  props.style = assign({},
                this.contructor.defaultProps.defaultStyle, props.style
              )
  props.className = (props.className || '') + ' ' +
                (this.constructor.defaultProps.defaultClassName || '')

  return props
}

auto-binding

In order to get autobinding, just extend the class exported by react-class

var ReactClass = require('react-class');

class App extends ReactClass { ... }

FAQ

What problems does it solve?

Generally you want your components to have a default style (of course, which can be overriden).

Very often you also want a default className to be applied all the time to your components, no matter if the user of your components passes a className attribute or not in the props.

Also, autobinding is a nice feature!

What if I want to remove it in the future?

react-class is a very thin layer around React.Component, so just in case you decide removing it in the future, you'll be safe and will only have to do very minor code changes.

We're not doing anything magical!

LICENSE

MIT