How to implement hydration in React | Bosc Tech Labs

React is a popular JavaScript library for building web application user interfaces. While developing with React, developers face various issues that can be solved with strong debugging skills. By effectively troubleshooting and resolving these problems, developers can save time and deliver high-quality React applications. 

Common issues during React development include syntax errors, rendering problems, state management challenges, runtime errors, event handling issues, lifecycle method errors, prop type mismatches, dependency conflicts, routing problems, styling and CSS issues, and API integration problems. To resolve these issues, developers should read error messages carefully, use debugging tools, and consult React’s documentation and community resources.

Improving debugging skills allows developers to quickly identify and fix problems, enabling them to overcome challenges efficiently and deliver high-quality React applications.

Debugging in React Application 

Debugging is essential for React developers, especially as projects grow more complex. In this blog post, we will explore advanced debugging tips and tricks for React applications. Our aim is to equip you with the knowledge and tools to tackle even the most elusive bugs.

Strong debugging skills are essential for React applications. Techniques like console logging, browser tools, and React Developer Tools can help address issues like unexpected behavior, state management challenges, slow rendering, and complex data flow. Error boundaries and the React Profiler aid in error handling and performance optimization. By effectively applying these debugging skills, developers enhance functionality and boost React application performance.

By refining your debugging skills, you’ll be well-prepared to navigate the complexities of React application development and deliver robust and efficient solutions. So, let’s dive into the world of debugging React applications and uncover the secrets of bug hunting!

1. Use console logging

Console.log in React helps debug code by logging information to the browser’s console. It tracks variables, checks function execution, and inspects values during runtime.

Power of console.log:

Outputting Information: Console.log easily displays messages, variables, objects, and other data types in the console.

Real-Time Insight: Placing console.log strategically reveals real-time insights, tracking execution flow, variable values, and component/function interactions.

Problem Diagnosis: Console.log helps diagnose issues by logging relevant data such as function parameters, intermediate values, or error messages.

Tracking Code Execution: By logging messages at key points like lifecycle methods or event handlers, console.log enables tracking and validation of code execution.

Iterative Development: Console.log aids in iterative development by logging values and verifying code output, facilitating incremental adjustments and validation. 

In this example:

The component renders a count value and provides buttons to increment and double the count.

The useEffect hook logs “Component rendered” once when the component is mounted.

The incrementCount function increments the count and logs the current count value.

The doubleCount function doubles the count and logs the current count value.

A console log message “Rendering component” is placed to track the rendering of the component.

By observing the console output, you can see when the component is rendered, track count changes, and monitor component rendering.

2. Use React Developer Tools

React Developer Tools is a browser extension that helps developers debug React applications. It offers a range of features to understand, inspect, and manipulate components and states. Here’s how it aids in debugging large-scale applications:

Component Hierarchy: Provides a tree view of all components, helping understand complex hierarchies.

Component Inspection: Allows inspection of individual components, including props and state. 

State Management: Integrates with popular libraries like Redux to inspect and track state changes. 

Performance Profiling: Measures render times, identifies re-renders, and detects performance bottlenecks. 

React Developer Tools empowers developers by providing insights into React applications, assisting in understanding hierarchies, inspecting states and props, tracking changes, identifying performance issues, and debugging complex scenarios. These capabilities are valuable for extensive and intricate codebases in large-scale applications.

          3. Implementing React Error Boundaries

React Error Boundaries catch JavaScript errors in their child component tree during rendering, lifecycle methods, and event handling.

They prevent the entire application from crashing by handling errors gracefully.

When an error occurs within the subtree of an Error Boundary component, it displays a fallback UI instead of the crashed component tree.

Error Boundaries are similar to “try-catch” blocks in JavaScript but are specific to React components.

They improve user experience by displaying a fallback UI and allowing the rest of the application to function without disruption.

Error Boundaries aid in debugging and error reporting by logging and analyzing errors.

They help isolate errors to specific components, preventing them from impacting the entire application.

4.  Utilize strict mode in react application

React Strict Mode is a developer tool that detects and flags potential problems in a React application. It applies strict checks and warnings to identify common mistakes and performance issues, helping developers address them during the development process.

React Strict Mode helps in the following ways:

Identifying Unsafe Practices: Detects and warns about unsafe lifecycle methods, deprecated features, and potential issues in your codebase.

Highlighting Side Effects: Detects unexpected side effects during component rendering, helping you identify and fix unintended consequences.

Catching State Mutation: Warns about state mutations, ensuring a more predictable and maintainable application state.

Detecting Deprecated Features: Alerts about deprecated features, encouraging updating code to utilize recommended alternatives.

Performance Warnings: Provides performance-related warnings, optimizing application rendering performance.

     5. Debugging Asynchronous Operations 

When debugging asynchronous operations in a React application, there are several important points to consider. Here are some key aspects to look into:

API Calls: Use console.log or debugger before and after making requests. Check the browser’s “Network” panel for details.

State Management: Console.log or debugger where state changes occur. Use browser tools or extensions for deeper inspection.

Promises: Log resolved values and handle errors using console.log or debugger within “then” and “catch” methods.

Async/await: Set breakpoints on “await” lines to inspect variables. Use try-catch blocks for error handling.

Timer-based operations: Place console.log or debugger in timer callbacks to understand timing and code execution.

Combine techniques and tools like console.log, debugger, and browser developer tools for effective debugging.

    6. Inspect Component Props and State 

To improve your React application’s performance, follow these steps:

Add console.log statements: Place console.log statements in important parts of your code, such as lifecycle methods, event handlers, or useEffect hooks. Log relevant data like props, state, or variable values to track execution flow and observe data changes.

Examine prop flow: Analyze how props are passed down the component tree. Avoid unnecessary drilling of props through intermediate components, as this can cause unnecessary re-renders. Optimize performance by using techniques like React.memo or shouldComponentUpdate to prevent re-rendering when props or states haven’t changed.

Use performance profiling tools: Take advantage of performance profiling tools available in your development environment. Measure CPU usage, memory consumption, and network requests to identify potential bottlenecks. Optimize your code based on the insights gained from profiling, ensuring an efficient and responsive React application.

By implementing these techniques, you can gain valuable insights into component flow, optimize performance, and create an efficient and responsive React application.

7. Debugging Common React Issues

React Developer Common Errors & Solutions:

Syntax Errors: Review and fix typos, missing brackets, or incorrect syntax in your code.

Rendering Issues: Check component rendering logic, lifecycle methods, and props/state usage.

State Management Issues: Review state management approach, initialize/update state properly, and ensure correct state access.

Undefined or Null Errors: Handle cases where variables or properties may be undefined or null.

Event Handling Issues: Double-check event handlers bind ‘this’ correctly, and access event properties properly.

Prop Type Mismatches: Define and enforce prop types to ensure correct data types.

Analyze Network Requests: Use browser network tools to inspect API requests and responses.

Dependency Conflicts: Carefully manage dependencies, ensure compatibility, and resolve conflicts.

API Integration Problems: Review API integration code, check endpoints, format data correctly, and handle responses/errors appropriately.

Remember to analyze error messages, refer to documentation, and seek community resources for solutions. Experience and practice will enhance your ability to identify and resolve these common React errors.

8. Test with different environments and browsers

Testing your React application in different environments and browsers is crucial for debugging and improving your code. It offers several benefits:

Bug Reproduction and Isolation: Testing in various setups helps reproduce and isolate bugs that may be specific to certain environments or browsers. This aids in understanding the root cause and finding solutions.

Browser-Specific Issue Identification: Different browsers have their own quirks and behaviors that can affect your React application. Testing in multiple browsers helps identify browser-specific issues, allowing you to address them appropriately.

Performance Optimization: Testing in different environments and browsers reveals performance bottlenecks that may be specific to certain setups. This enables you to optimize areas of your code and improve overall performance.

Accessibility Testing: Testing with screen readers and accessibility tools in different environments ensures your application meets accessibility standards. It helps identify and address any accessibility-related issues for better usability.

Cross-Platform Compatibility: Testing on different platforms ensures your React application works consistently across devices and operating systems. It helps identify platform-specific bugs or limitations, allowing you to provide a seamless experience for all users.

Conclusion:

Debugging React applications can be challenging, but with the right techniques and tools, developers can effectively identify and resolve issues. In this post, we explored advanced tips for debugging React apps, including console logging, React Developer Tools, Error Boundaries, strict mode, and more. By following these steps, you’ll improve your ability to tackle complex bugs and enhance the quality of your React applications. Remember to be patient and persistent during the trial-and-error process of debugging. Analyze error messages, consult React’s documentation and community resources, and practice regularly to become a proficient debugger. With experience, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of React’s inner workings and build robust applications.

A quality developer is the one who has the capacity of continuous learning and gets acquainted with the ever- changing environment. But with the increasing amount of data and technology in market, for the developers, it becomes very tough to choose right React libraries. Right choice of 3rd party libraries helps developers a lot, to develop system more user-friendly in effective way and save their time more importantly.

So now we will be discussing curated list of React libraries which offers great solution and is very useful to use in 2023. These libraries helps save time writing monotonous code which is already handy with many extra features.

Redux

Redux is commonly used with React, but can be used with other UI framework or library as Redux is a state management library for JavaScript applications.

While working with React project, we deal with issues handling data, and there comes as savior, Redux. It is the best library for managing the state of an application. The state of the application is represented as a single object called the “store”, which is responsible for holding the entire state of the application. The store is immutable, which means that it cannot be changed directly.

To change the values in store, actions are dispatched to the store, which describe the changes that need to be made. A reducer function then takes the current state and the dispatched action as arguments, and returns a new state object that incorporates the changes described in the action.

Overall, Redux is a powerful library for managing application state in a predictable and centralized way, and helps to maintain state conveniently.

React Router

React Router , as the name says, it’s a popular routing library for React, which allows you to manage the routing and navigation of single-page applications (SPAs). It enables you to create dynamic, responsive and scalable web applications with multiple pages, using the power of React.

Here are some of the key features of React Router:

Declarative routing

Nested routing

Dynamic routing

Route matching and switching

History manipulation

Server-side rendering

React Router is widely used by developers to build complex and scalable applications, and it has a large community of contributors and plugins that can help you extend its functionality even further.

Axios

Axios is used for making HTTP requests from both the browser and js.

When used with React, Axios can be used to fetch data from a server and then update the state of a component with the retrieved data. Axios is also isomorphic = it can run in the browser and nodejs with the same codebase.

Here are some key features and benefits of using Axios with React:

Simple API

Promise-based

Cross-platform

Interceptors

Timeouts

Error handling

Cancel requests

Progress capturing for browsers and js with extra info (speed rate, remaining time)

Automatic JSON data handling in response

Overall, Axios is a powerful and versatile library that can be a valuable tool for building React applications that communicate with servers. Its simple API, promise-based approach, and ability to work in both the browser and Node.js environments make it a popular choice for developers

Formik

Formik is a popular open source library for building forms in React applications. Formik keeps track of your form’s state and then exposes it plus a few reusable methods and event handlers to your form via It is a small group of React components and hooks for building forms in React and React Native

Some of its best features are:

Simplified form management: Formik simplifies the process of managing forms in React by providing a set of hooks and components that handle common form tasks like validation, handling form submission, and managing form state.

Simplified form management

Field-level validation

Integration with Yup

Support for complex forms

Flexible render props

Easy to test

Overall, Formik is a powerful and flexible library that simplifies the process of building forms in React applications. Its features make it easy to create complex forms, validate user input, and customize the look and feel of your forms to match your application’s design.

Material-UI

Material-UI is a popular open-source library that provides a set of reusable React components that implement Google’s Material Design It’s is a design language created by Google that focuses on creating a consistent user experience across all platforms and devices, helping build new features faster.

Some of the key features of Material-UI include:

Reusable React components

Customizable styling and theming

Accessibility

Responsive design

Comprehensive documentation Also it holds a good support channel.

Overall, Material-UI is a great choice for developers who want to create beautiful and responsive user interfaces in their React applications.

Tailwind

Tailwind works by scanning all of your HTML files, JavaScript components, and any other templates for class names, generating the corresponding styles and then writing them to a static CSS file.

Using Tailwind with React can be extremely beneficial for several reasons:

Consistent styling: Tailwind’s pre-defined CSS classes provide a consistent styling language that makes it easy to maintain a consistent look and feel across your React application.

Faster development: Tailwind’s pre-defined classes can save you time by eliminating the need to write custom CSS. This can speed up your development process and allow you to focus on building your application’s logic instead of styling.

Responsive design: Tailwind provides a set of responsive classes that allow you to create responsive designs without having to write media queries manually.

Customizable: While Tailwind provides a set of pre-defined classes, you can also customize the framework to meet your specific needs. This allows you to create your own

Low specificity: Tailwind’s class-based approach to styling ensures that your styles have low specificity, making it easier to override styles when necessary.

Easy to learn: Tailwind’s straightforward class naming system makes it easy to learn and understand, even for developers who are new to CSS.

Overall, using Tailwind with React can save you time, improve consistency in your styling, and make it easier to create responsive designs. It can also help you create a more maintainable and scalable codebase by providing a consistent styling language that is easy to understand and modify.

Yup

Yup is a powerful and flexible JavaScript validation library that allows you to easily validate data in your applications. Yup saves React developers from writing monotonous and repeated code for handling validation in the form. Yup gives bundles of options and solution to define validation schema which can handle validation in complex form too. Some of its best features are:

Schema-based validation

Extensible

Asynchronous validation

Integration with React

Lightweight

Localization support

Chainable syntax

Overall, Yup is a powerful and flexible validation library that makes it easy to validate data in your applications. Its schema-based approach, extensibility, and support for asynchronous validation make it a popular choice for developers who need to validate data in their applications. Additionally, its integration with React and support for localization make it a versatile tool that can be used in a variety of applications.

Mantine

Mantine is a modern React UI library with a focus on usability, performance, and It provides a wide range of customizable components and hooks to help you quickly build high-quality, responsive user interfaces for your React applications.

Some key features of Mantine include:

Accessibility

Performance

Customizability

Documentation

Community

TypeScript support

Theming

Responsive design

Developer tools

Growing ecosystem

Overall, Mantine is a well-documented, well-maintained, and has a growing community of developers who contribute to its development and use it in their own projects.

React Intl

React Intl is a JavaScript library that provides internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) support for React applications. It allows developers to format dates, times, numbers, and currencies according to different locales and language React Intl also provides features like pluralization, gender inflection, and message translation that help to make your application accessible to a global audience.

React Intl is built on top of the Internationalization API (Intl) that is available in modern browsers. It uses the same API to format and display messages in different languages and locales. However, React Intl provides a higher-level abstraction that simplifies the process of formatting and translating messages in a React application.

Some of the key features of React Intl include:

Message formatting

Pluralization

Gender inflection

Message translation

Integration with React

Overall, React Intl is a powerful and flexible library that makes it easy to add internationalization and localization support to your React application. It provides a wide range of features and options that help to ensure your application is accessible to a global audience.

Enzyme

Enzyme is a JavaScript testing utility library that is commonly used for testing React It provides a set of APIs to traverse and manipulate React components’ output, making it easier to test and verify their behavior. Enzyme allows you to simulate user interaction with your components and test the output based on those

interactions. This enables you to test your React components in isolation, without the need to mount them in a full application context, and verify that they behave as expected.

Some of the features of Enzyme include:

Shallow rendering

Full DOM rendering

API for traversing and manipulating components

Compatibility with popular testing frameworks

Overall, Enzyme is a powerful tool for testing React applications that can help improve your test coverage and ensure that your components behave as expected in different scenarios.

Conclusion

So, here we have explored many popular and valuable React Libraries, which may be usefull at different times while working on any project. These libraries will help creating dynamic, user-friendly interfaces by saving your time from long coding. Give look to this document before planning your packages for React project. Hope you found this helpful !!!

Prologue

AngularJS was a decent framework when you wanted to get an MVP live in no time although enforcing a robust architecture or securing great performance, AngularJS was never the first choice. The announcement of Angular as backward incompatible, complete rewrite of AngularJS killed the prospects of the framework and ruined the ecosystem around it. We realized AngularJS doesn’t deserve our time, efforts and money anymore; React was looking promising though.

Migrations: An Untold Story

Migrations are tricky whether it is moving from one home to another, one web browser to another or one development technology to another. Ideally, migrations should not happen but in our pursuit to move forward, we tend to abandon things that are not moving fast enough. Your home will start showing signs in 25 years and your car in five years. Internet Explorer went fine for more than two decades and is still in maintenance mode. Maintenance mode is a code in software world to indicate migration. It’s when you receive a notice from your landlord to empty the apartment in 60 days. You got to find yourself a new home sooner or later. We were in the same situation with an AngularJS application. The client had made his mind halfway towards migration. A little push and he was ready to React!

React for the Unreactive

React, Ember and Angular were the three options when we made our mind to make the migration. Angular was still in beta and not ready for production and, of course, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Ember is a fine framework for most of the people. Ember touches spots where data-bindings, caching layers between various components and program flow gets a little sloppy. We did not want that to happen again. The whole concept where the entire UI is a clear tree and data flows top down from an immutable data store was a dream come true for us. I mean who doesn’t want their web applications to have this predictable architecture.

Developing applications in React is like setting up water pipeline in an apartment building. The water flows downwards from overhead tank down to the apartments below. Ask a plumber to develop a system of pipelines where water can move either ways. He won’t show up the next day—I am not a magician. Now you know why developers have embraced angularjs to react migration with open arms.

Fixing the Migration Approach

You are a proud Chevy owner and want to stick with a 1930 model as long as you will drive. However, one that you have is not up for your daily commute. You cannot do much because that is the only car that you have and you’re committed to it. You visited a renowned car modification expert in your neighborhood and he agrees to upgrade your car with a fresh coat of paint and 21st century mechanical and electric parts while you can still take it on a drive every evening.

If you’re a mechanic with unlimited budget, then creating a replica is less risky since the client is a little paranoid about his car and may freak out if it stops working during his daily drives.

In real world scenarios, this is how you approach migrations, automobiles or web technologies. This was our plan until… We will build an application clone in React and replace it with the AngularJS application one day. This is how migrations are done or is there another way? If I tell you that you can keep riding your car as you were and I will replace one car component every day until you have a new car. Sounds ridiculous? I thought so too then I realized this makes more sense in the context of software engineering than automobile engineering. A few “Google searches” later, we were fixated on this gradual approach.

Of course, many more factors influenced our choice. AngularJS was an incredible tool to setup MVPs and most of the applications were in a perpetual development cycle. Our scrum-masters decimated the idea of a rewrite. We had to integrate six features into the application in the next six months. A parallel, non-gradual approach meant we had to code the exact, to-be-integrated features in React as well as, god forbid, AngularJS. Some of the features we were adding were beyond the scope of AngularJS or were too much work. We could code the same feature in React in a matter of weeks. React is perfect ;).

Prerequisites

The application was still in AngularJS 1.2 as we were more interested in a migration than upgradation. The attempts to get rid of AngularJS finally and the legacy code was not of much help. In fact, the legacy code made the simple upgradation to AngularJS 1.5 a headache.

You will be shocked to learn we were hardcoded to Bower & Gulp. I repeat Gulp and Bower. You reach a stage in AngularJS development that you start improvising to survive. We reached that stage while developing the app a long time ago and after that, it was all playing with fire. We did not made the upgrade to npm and Webpack because it might break the entire application and we have to revert to the earlier version eventually. Now we have to make the upgrade one last time and we would do it with a smiling face.

AngularJS to React Migration – Key Points

The first thing you will notice while migrating AngularJS application to ReactJS is Components. Components are the building blocks of ReactJS; they are everywhere. AngularJS has directives and they are similar. You could switch the view layer from Angular style templates to React style components and things should turn out fine in most cases as long as you’re using one of those style guides, stick to yours and do not improvise. This is neither AngularJS nor will not turn out to be. You got to start on a solid foundation for your application. Converting Angular directives to React Components was facilitated by a JS library react2angular.

While the 3rd party library made the conversion approachable. We still had to pass them to Redux store. Yes, React + Redux is the industry standard when building React application. When building a new React application, you wrap the root components into Provider. In our approach, where we essentially adding new features in React to an AngularJS application, we had no options but to manually wrap each component with a provider. We were literally copy-pasting code, component after components although ng-redux made the job a little easier.

After a couple of months into making the essential parts work, we were on the last part—setting up routing paths for the newly development parts of the application in React. We wanted to be ready for production as soon as possible. To make things a little more faster and efficient, we wrapped the React component in an AngularJS component and routed it to an inline-template that employs the AngularJS component. react2angular was the reason we could complete the project faster and before the client expected.

Epilogue

When your approach is gradual migration, things get a little complicated. Of course, changing engine in a moving car is more difficult than in one parked in the garage. On top of that, you have to add new features as well replace the existing ones at the same time. Of course, this saves you from rewriting the same code in two different technologies. Nevertheless, making changes in the codebase of a live application is not very different from playing with fire. Gradual approach is indeed not the ideal way to face the migration.

A parallel rewrite makes more sense from both development and business point of view. It is more of a luxury and necessity. As I said technology migrations are not straightforward, sometimes to make things work and make business sense, you have to pick the unconventional way.