How to Add Typechecking to Your React Components
A simple way to help reduce bugs
Adding Typechecking to your React components is easy and super helpful when it comes to catching potential bugs.
Why should you care?
When you design your React application and the components that make up the application, you do so knowing that in most cases you will be passing data from parent components to child components.
Each child component that accepts props from the parent has an expectation of the kind of data that will be passed to it. There is an implicit agreement made when defining the child components interface but there isn’t any way to enforce it.
If the wrong type of data is passed, we have a type conflict. The child component expected data of one type but received something other than that type.
In a strongly typed language like C# or Java, the compiler would catch this error at compile time and notify the programmer. JavaScript does not provide this nicety but we can add this kind of checking to our components.
If you’re interested in learning more about JavaScripts Dynamic type system, check out the docs here.
