What Really Happens When You Use the TextField Component in Material-UI?

Let’s investigate a little deeper

Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash

I have been using Material-UI for many of my personal projects, and now recently for my job.

If you are not familiar with Material-UI, it is a React UI framework that follows the principles of Material design. You can create beautiful React applications easily with their component library.

The other day I was trying to create a form and I used the TextField component like I normally would. The TextField component usually will look something like this, depending on which variant you use.

However, the design I was given had the label outside of the input field. This led me down a path to truly understand how Material-UI works, especially when dealing with the TextField component. In this article, we will break it down. By the end of the article, I hope you will have a better understanding of how Material-UI works under the hood.

What is the TextField component?

Looking at their documentation,

The TextField wrapper component is a complete form control including a label, input and help text.

A wrapper component? What does this mean? Basically, this means that the TextField…