Styling React Components

Through time, several approaches and tactics have made styling React components easier and more effective. Four main styling methodologies will be covered in this blog, along with examples of how to apply each one to React component styling. After this blog, you will understand all there is to know.
Table of Contents

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Table of Contents

About styling React components, including how they function and the several styling tactics that may be employed. I will go over the advantages and disadvantages of each style strategy as I go along.


In React Applications, What Exactly Is “Styling”?

The same rationale that guides the styling of other websites or web apps you’ve been working on will also guide the styling of your React application. React components and elements are presented on screens or in other media according to their styling in apps.

The flexibility to construct these UIs, especially as components, and design them to provide us with an amazing appearance and feel is the heart of developing front-end user interfaces with React.


Whatever styling approach you choose, it’s crucial to understand that you are still writing CSS in the same manner that you always have.


The major difference is in how React’s unique features enable the strategies—which we’ll be examining—to facilitate a straightforward procedure.


List Out the Major Styling Strategies In React

While integrating the styling of React components, there are a number of different approaches to take into consideration. These approaches have grown and changed over time. In order to design our React components, we will discuss the most common and up-to-date styling techniques in this blog. Some of these styling techniques are:


1. CSS Modules: 

Every class name and animation name in a CSS module is scoped locally by default. Every class name and animation name in a CSS module is scoped locally by default. A separate CSS file that is scoped to the file and the component alone is given to each React component when utilizing CSS Modules.


When local class names, which can be extremely short and conflict-free, are mapped directly to automatically generated ones and exported as JS object literals for usage within React, that is when the beauty of CSS modules is shown throughout the build process. Importing the file straight into the component file allows us to use CSS Modules in our React apps. 


Error bounds must, however, be used properly. Their purpose is not to regulate the behaviour of your programme or manage unforeseen issues. They also fail to catch errors in event handlers and asynchronous code, such setTimeout or Promise callbacks.


The Main Advantages of Using styled-components

Resetting the state of the error boundary that is, erasing the error and trying to redraw the component tree is one of react-error-boundary’s most useful capabilities. In situations when a mistake might only be temporary like a network fault brought on by a brief disconnect, this can be helpful.

  • Modular and reusable CSS.
  • No more styling conflicts.
  • Explicit dependencies.
  • Local scope.
  • Clear dependencies.
  • No Code duplication in the case of SSR.
  • No Additional costs in JS payload.
  • Variables, Sharing variables in CSS and exposing it to JavaScript.

An illustration of using a CSS module in a React Component can be seen in the code below. 


//Box.css

 :local(.container) {

   margin: 40px;

   border: 5px dashed pink;

 }

 :local(.content) {

   font-size: 15px;

   text-align: center;

 }


Styled-components:

You may employ component-level styles in your application that are written in a combination of JavaScript and CSS (a method known as CSS-in-JS) by utilizing the styled-components library for React and React Native.


It was designed using the same operating mechanism as CSS Modules, allowing you to write CSS that is exclusive to a particular component and inaccessible to any other component or page element.


React developers no longer need to worry about class name collisions when writing plain CSS in React components thanks to styled-components. For instance, we would need to complete the following actions before we could use styled components to apply styling in our Box.js file: 


  • First, we need to install styled-components library by running 
  • npm install styled-components –save.
  • The next step is to write a component to import the styled component library into our.
  • import styled from ‘styled-components’;
  • Choosing a specific HTML element to hold our style keys allows us to construct a variable at this point.
  • Then, as a wrapper over our JSX components, we utilise the name of the variable we constructed.

The Main Advantages of Using styled-components

Consistency: Your task of publishing a React component to NPM is simplified using styled-components. There is no conflict with CSS selectors when customizing these components using properties or extending them using styled (Component).


SAAS Syntax Out-Of-The-Box: No additional build tools or SASS installation is required to obtain the SASS trademark syntax straight out of the box.


Dynamic Styling: If you’re experienced using React, you can utilize props to dynamically update the styles in any way that seems right.


Theming: Styled-components provides a Theme Context available through React’s Context API, to which you can give a theme object. This allows the theme object to be easily accessed in any component and, by default, interpolated into styled definitions.


We’ve implemented each of the mentioned stages in the code that follows.


import React from ‘react’;

import styled from ‘styled-components’;

const Box = styled.div`

  margin: 40px;

  border: 5px black;

`;

const Content = styled.p`

  font-size: 16px;

  text-align: center;

`;

const Box = () => (

  <Box>

    <Content> Styling React Components </Content>

  </Box>

);

export default Box;


2. CSS-in-JS

An innovative method for managing styles in React apps is CSS-in-JS, which combines CSS and JavaScript. With CSS-in-JS, developers may use JavaScript to directly encapsulate styles within their components, in contrast to traditional CSS, where styles are frequently defined in separate files or within HTML elements. This paradigm change improves the speed, maintainability, and modularity of style in React apps in a number of ways.


Styles are normally defined in distinct files or style tags in conventional CSS. Conflicts with class names, global scope problems, and trouble maintaining style consistency might result from this. By enabling styles to be scoped to particular components, CSS-in-JS libraries help to relieve these issues. This implies that styles defined in one component don’t conflict with those defined in another.


The Main Advantages of Using CSS-in-JS

Scooped Styles:Style reasoning is facilitated and conflicts are minimised with CSS-in-JS as styles are scoped to the component in which they are created by default.


Dynamic Styling:Styles that are dynamic and dependent on props or state may be made with JavaScript. Making interactive and adaptable user interface elements is made possible by this.


Component-Based Approach:Development approaches that are more modular and component-centric are encouraged by the close relationship between styles and components.


Elimination of Class Name Collisions:The likelihood of class name clashes is reduced since class names are frequently produced dynamically.


Here are the examples of CSS-in-JS;


import React from ‘react’;

import { css } from ‘@emotion/react’;

const Button = () => {

  constbuttonStyle = css`

    background-color: blue;

    color: white;

    padding: 10px 20px;

  `;

  return <button css={buttonStyle}>Click me</button>;

};


export default Button;


Conclusion

Writing CSS directly within your JavaScript files for a more modular and maintainable approach is made possible by Styled Components, a robust and flexible toolkit for decorating React applications. Styled Components has features that can help you design applications that are more scalable, adaptable, and clean.


These features include global styles, theming, scoped styles, and dynamic styling. You may take advantage of all of CSS-in-JS’s capabilities to provide styling solutions that are more effective and efficient by include Styled Components into your applications.


Frequently Asked Questions

1. What builds up React JS’s style component?

Writing CSS in JavaScript is made possible by the React Styled-component Module, which makes React much more modular and reusable. We may utilise styled-component to improve the developer experience in React projects rather than having a single global CSS file.


2. Why does React use CSS styling?

The styling of a React app or component is done with CSS. While adding dynamically computed styles at render time, the style property is the most often used attribute for styling in React applications. Rather of accepting a CSS string, it takes a JavaScript object with camelCased attributes.


3. How is CSS used in JavaScript?

Style blocks are used to inject styles into the DOM after processing all JavaScript style definitions into vanilla CSS, which is the foundation of CSS-in-JS.


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