6-Dec

React

Fragments, finally!

Fragments lets you return several root nodes from your components. Finally we can skip those pesky container divs!

2 min read

·

By Kristofer Giltvedt Selbekk

·

December 6, 2017

React 16.2.0 is fresh off the presses, and one of the major new features it ships with is something called fragments. Simply put, a fragment is a "component" that only returns its children, without any new wrapper DOM node.

Here's an example on how it can look:

import React, { Fragment } from "react";

const PersonalDetails = (props) => (
  <Fragment>
    <p>Name: {props.name}</p>
    <p>Age: {props.age}</p>
  </Fragment>
);

This looks pretty similar like you might have done it back in the days, but probably surrounding those <p />s with a <div />-tag. That might not be a problem for this structure, but what about components rendering table rows? Or list items? A wrapping element would probably not be the way to go then.

This enhancement lets us do a ton of cool things - like rendering definition lists!

Also a feature in JSX!

Along with this newest 16.2.0 release of React, JSX got support for a short-hand fragment syntax - <></>. This is exactly the same as the example over - but now you don't have to import anything!

import React from "react";

const PersonalDetails = (props) => (
  <>
    <p>Name: {props.name}</p>
    <p>Age: {props.age}</p>
  </>
);

Looks cool eh? Go try it out! Although it's really new and untested, it's already supported in most major IDEs, TypeScript, Babel (although in v7.0.0-beta) and linters like ESLint. There aren't a lot of resources yet, but I'll make sure to update this article whenever the experience reports and tutorials start showing up.

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