children prop in React component

i am learning react at the moment. this is the link with the code - http://redux.js.org/docs/basics/ExampleTodoList.html

I am having a bit of difficulty understanding what's going on in this part of the code

const Link = ({ active, children, onClick }) => {
  if (active) {
    return <span>{children}</span>
  }

  return (
    <a
      href="#"
      onClick={e => {
        e.preventDefault()
        onClick()
      }}
    >
      {children}
    </a>
  )
}

Link.propTypes = {
  active: PropTypes.bool.isRequired,
  children: PropTypes.node.isRequired,
  onClick: PropTypes.func.isRequired
}

I am having the most difficulty understand this snippet

return (
        <a
          href="#"
          onClick={e => {
            e.preventDefault()
            onClick()
          }}
        >
          {children}
        </a>
      )
    }

What does {children} mean here? What does it do?

and what does this do?

children: PropTypes.node.isRequired,

what is meant by node in the above line?

Solution 1:

When you use a Custom component, like

<MyComponent>Hello World</MyComponent>

Whatever you write between the tags (in above case Hello World) is passed to the component as a children prop.

So when write your component like

const Link = ({ active, children, onClick }) => {

You are destructuring the props and getting only active, children and onClick from the props passed to the component

Consider for example, you call the Link component like

<Link active="true" onClick={someFunc} style={{color: 'orange'}}>Hello</Link>

Then amongst all the props i.e active, onClick, style, children, you will only be accessing active, onClick,children in the component.

For your second question:

and what does this do?

children: PropTypes.node.isRequired,

So here PropTypes is a way of performing a typeCheck on the props that are passed to the component. It is being imported from the react-proptypes package.

So

children: PropTypes.node.isRequired

makes the prop children to be required. So if your render your component like

<Link />

It will not pass the type check and hence you need to do

<Link>Text</Link>

Solution 2:

children: PropTypes.node.isRequired,

this is just the type checking of the react proptypes. Refer https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/typechecking-with-proptypes.html for more details how type checking works.

According to the example this says that the prop children is required and is of type node. This type node refers to anything that can be rendered. which is then included within the tag in your rendering.