Design patterns in React.js can significantly elevate your eCommerce projects. In this blog article we explore the practical use of Compound, HOC, Hooks, and Container/Presentational Patterns, sharing insights from our front-end team's experience to enhance code quality and client results.
Compound Pattern
When we have data that we want to share between different UI components, we can use the Context API or a Global Application State. Each component will re-render when the data changes. For example, you may have products listed in one place and a summary of that data shown elsewhere. The source for both is the same but displayed differently. In this case, the Compound Pattern can help prevent repetitive fetch requests.
There are many other examples in eCommerce platforms, such as sharing the product ID between different components instead of passing it from the main UI component to numerous child components.
HOC Pattern
Many concepts in developing UI components for an eCommerce site are shared, such as styles, restrictions, enabling/disabling, client-side authentication, and more. In these cases, you can create a Higher-Order Component (HOC) and use it across other components. For example, you can create a repeating style for product links with hover and active states.
One useful tip is to use a specific prefix like "with" for these components, making them easily distinguishable throughout the project.
Hooks Pattern
Using hooks properly in React.js and Next.js is essential. In many cases, hooks can replace traditional patterns. For example, displaying different badges in various parts of a component can be challenging, but custom hooks can achieve this with a single codebase.
Hooks are also easy to understand and remove many complexities from the codebase.
Container/Presentational Pattern
Separating application logic from the view helps maintain and structure the project. In React, we can use class components and functional components to achieve this, but a better solution is to use functional components along with custom hooks.
For example, imagine you want to display a search form with different fields, each requiring data fetched from a server. By categorizing a component to show the categories and using a custom hook to fetch data, you can effectively implement the Container/Presentational Pattern in your project.
Conclusion
In summary, design patterns in React have significantly enhanced our development of eCommerce UI components. Over the past six years, we have successfully applied these patterns in numerous projects, leveraging React.js, Next.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript-based platforms like commercetools. These design patterns have enabled us to create more structured, maintainable, and extensible projects, consistently improving our development processes and outcomes.
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