React Styled-Components: A Run-through

How good are style components in React for styling web pages? If you ask us, we would say it is pretty good!

Adding style to web pages using styled-components has been the practice that brings the quintessential appearance to applications.

So how about we learn a little something about how to style your apps? Let’s get started!

What are the prerequisites?

Do you have the following prerequisites installed and running to follow the coding part?

• Command line interface running on administrative privileges
• JavaScript and CSS understanding
• Yarn or npm package manager
• Code creator like VS Code of your choice
• The latest version of Node.JS

What are React and its components?

React is an open-source JavaScript library powered by Facebook Inc. If you are looking forward to building an app in an urbane and responsive User Interface and components, then React is your best course of action. React is one of the most preferred frameworks of front-end developers as it is component-based.

React in the front-end integrates well with backend libraries like Node.JS, Django, Java among others. As a fast, simple, and scalable framework, React extends data changes in your applications without having to reload the applications.

Applications built using React have the provision of developing each of its parts separately and can be reused as a component. React components are reusable JavaScript functions that manage what appears on the UI and the sequence in which it is appearing. The React components return HTML scripts and other pieces built separately as JSX code through the render() function.

These components are then amassed to create complex user interfaces. Additionally, the React components enable developers to segment their application’s UI into independent and reusable sections to engage each section in segregation.

The parts in a web application like navigation bar, search bar, header, and other sections are built as components and merged into a single UI using React components. The components in React can be written as Functions or Classes. Functions or Classes accept defined inputs/props for fixing what is to be delivered on the browsers.

Props are like function arguments that pass data as input from one component to the other. In JavaScript, the functional component takes in single-props as an argument transferred to a component and returns a react element without using the render() method.

In the case of class components, the base component- React. Component- return all defined React elements through the react() method.

In React, buttons, content areas, navigation, dialogue boxes, etc. are a few of the frontend parts that can be defined as components. Now let us see more about React’s styled-components.

Major Styling Strategies in React

How about now we discuss the most popular modern styling strategies in React and how to use them to style your React components? Here are some of the top styling strategies in React:

 

• CSS and SCSS stylesheets

 

Separate stylesheets are like the traditional way of styling the HTML websites with CSS or CSS preprocessor-SCSS.

 

• CSS modules

 

CSS modules are CSS files in which all class names alongside animation names are defined in the local setting by default.

 

• Styled Components

 

Styled-components is a library created for React and React Native developers, enabling them to use component-level styles in their applications. Styled-components are a combination of JavaScript and CSS using the CSS-in-JS technique.

 

• JSS

 

JSS is an authoring tool for CSS which uses JavaScript to describe styles in a hassle-free, declarative, and reusable manner that is compiled in the browser, server-side, or at build time in the node.

What is React Styled-Components?

As already mentioned, styled components is a library created for React and React Native developers, enabling them to use component-level styles in their applications. Styled-components are a combination of JavaScript and CSS using the CSS-in-JS technique.

CSS offers developers the flexibility to reuse their codes of a particular project for another one. This is possible because styled-components are centered on tagged template literals, which means the CSS codes are written between backticks while styling your components. Another plus of styled-components is that they do not require the mapping of the already created components to external CSS styles.

More about Styled-Components:

Styled-components we’re created with the same operation as CSS modules. This way the scope of CSS is limited to a single component and will be inaccessible by any other element in the page or even component.

Say, you need to do styling in Box.js file. Following are the steps to follow:

1. Install styled-components library by running npm install styled-components –save.
2. Import a styled-component library into your component by writing import styled from ‘styled-components’;.
3. Create a variable by choosing an HTML element where style keys are stored.
4. Use the name of the created variable as a wrapper around the JSX elements.

The above steps can be summarised in a code format. In the cod format, styled objects from styled components that use tagged template literals for styling. A variable is then created to hold the styling and to act as a wrapper around the content. For this, we have <Box> and <Content> tags, to assign styled objects plus the HTML element for styling followed by the accompanying styles for the HTML element. The JSX or content in between them as tags are wrapped to use the variables created for styling.

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; thank 

What are the advantages of styled-components?

• Provide unique class names for your styles thereby minimizing class name issues like name duplications, misspellings, and overlaps.
• Easy identification of CSS that are applied and easy deletion of unused component styles as styling is connected to a specific component.
• Simple and smart styling enabled through supported props and global themes, thereby nullifying the requirement of manually managing the chunks of classes.
• Irrespective of the size of your codebase, you can import different styles into other project areas.

Endnote: Why is the styled-component in React important?

• The consistency makes a styled-component easy for publishing a React component to NPM. Without clashing with CDS selectors, the components can be personalised through props and/or extending through styled(Component).
• Without installing SASS or any extra build tools, you can get SASs trademark syntax out-of-the-box.
• In React, to dynamically change styles or tweak the style in the way you want, you can make use of props.
• With ThemeContext, you can get a theme object accessible to any of your components, and by default can be inserted into styled definitions.

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