What is the difference between state and props in React?

I was watching a Pluralsight course on React and the instructor stated that props should not be changed. I'm now reading an article (uberVU/react-guide) on props vs. state and it says

Both props and state changes trigger a render update.

Later in the article it says:

Props (short for properties) are a Component's configuration, its options if you may. They are received from above and immutable.

So props can change but they should be immutable?
When should you use props and when should you use state?
If you have data that a React component needs, should it be passed through props or setup in the React component via getInitialState?

Props and state are related. The state of one component will often become the props of a child component. Props are passed to the child within the render method of the parent as the second argument to React.createElement() or, if you're using JSX, the more familiar tag attributes.

<MyChild name={this.state.childsName} />

The parent's state value of childsName becomes the child's this.props.name. From the child's perspective, the name prop is immutable. If it needs to be changed, the parent should just change its internal state:

this.setState({ childsName: 'New name' });

and React will propagate it to the child for you. A natural follow-on question is: what if the child needs to change its name prop? This is usually done through child events and parent callbacks. The child might expose an event called, for example, onNameChanged. The parent would then subscribe to the event by passing a callback handler.

<MyChild name={this.state.childsName} onNameChanged={this.handleName} />

The child would pass its requested new name as an argument to the event callback by calling, e.g., this.props.onNameChanged('New name'), and the parent would use the name in the event handler to update its state.

handleName: function(newName) {
   this.setState({ childsName: newName });
}

For parent-child communication, simply pass props.

Use state to store the data your current page needs in your controller-view.

Use props to pass data & event handlers down to your child components.

These lists should help guide you when working with data in your components.

Props

are immutable
- which lets React do fast reference checks
are used to pass data down from your view-controller
- your top level component
have better performance
- use this to pass data to child components

State

should be managed in your view-controller
- your top level component
is mutable
has worse performance
should not be accessed from child components
- pass it down with props instead

For communication between two components that don't have a parent-child relationship, you can set up your own global event system. Subscribe to events in componentDidMount(), unsubscribe in componentWillUnmount(), and call setState() when you receive an event. Flux pattern is one of the possible ways to arrange this. - https://facebook.github.io/react/tips/communicate-between-components.html

What Components Should Have State?

Most of your components should simply take some data from props and render it. However, sometimes you need to respond to user input, a server request or the passage of time. For this you use state.

Try to keep as many of your components as possible stateless. By doing this you'll isolate the state to its most logical place and minimize redundancy, making it easier to reason about your application.

A common pattern is to create several stateless components that just render data, and have a stateful component above them in the hierarchy that passes its state to its children via props. The stateful component encapsulates all of the interaction logic, while the stateless components take care of rendering data in a declarative way. - https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/interactivity-and-dynamic-uis.html#what-components-should-have-state

What Should Go in State?

State should contain data that a component's event handlers may change to trigger a UI update. In real apps this data tends to be very small and JSON-serializable. When building a stateful component, think about the minimal possible representation of its state, and only store those properties in this.state. Inside of render() simply compute any other information you need based on this state. You'll find that thinking about and writing applications in this way tends to lead to the most correct application, since adding redundant or computed values to state means that you need to explicitly keep them in sync rather than rely on React computing them for you. - https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/interactivity-and-dynamic-uis.html#what-should-go-in-state

You can understand it best by relating it to Plain JS functions.

Simply put,

State is the local state of the component which cannot be accessed and modified outside of the component. It's equivalent to local variables in a function.

Plain JS Function

const DummyFunction = () => {
  let name = 'Manoj';
  console.log(`Hey ${name}`)
}

React Component

class DummyComponent extends React.Component {
  state = {
    name: 'Manoj'
  }
  render() {
    return <div>Hello {this.state.name}</div>;
  }

Props, on the other hand, make components reusable by giving components the ability to receive data from their parent component in the form of props. They are equivalent to function parameters.

Plain JS Function

const DummyFunction = (name) => {
  console.log(`Hey ${name}`)
}

// when using the function
DummyFunction('Manoj');
DummyFunction('Ajay');

React Component

class DummyComponent extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return <div>Hello {this.props.name}</div>;
  }

}

// when using the component
<DummyComponent name="Manoj" />
<DummyComponent name="Ajay" />

Credits: Manoj Singh Negi

Article Link: React State vs Props explained

What is the difference between state and props in React?

Related

Recent Posts