Delve into TypeScript generics and learn to build reusable functions and React components for searching, sorting, and filtering data, enhancing both business logic and UI efficiency.

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TypeScript’s generics are a powerful tool that enables developers to ensure their code is flexible and reusable. Using generics can help developers manage exactly what types are used in functions and components around the application.

In this course, we’ll first get an overview of TypeScript generics and create generic search and sort functions. Next, we’ll create a React component for searching that would leverage our generic search function. Then, we’ll create a generic function and a React component for sorting and filtering, respectively. Finally, we’ll bring all these functionalities together to create one component that can manage searching, sorting, and filtering of any data passed to it.

By the end of this course, you'll know how to write generic TypeScript functions and craft React components that use TypeScript generics. You’ll also be able to deploy concise solutions in both business logic and user interface senses for searching, sorting, and filtering data on client side in applications.

Building User Interfaces and Functions with TypeScript and React

Now that our application successfully displays our `widgets` and `people` objects, we can start building our first functionality, a generic search function that we’ll call `genericSearch`.


# What is search, really?

In its most abstract form, searching is finding data that matches a query. In our situation, because we have already decided to `map` over both the `widgets` and `people` variables, we could consider our search to just be the call to the JavaScript array `filter` function before we call `map` to render the items. With our current setup, that looks something like this:

<>
{widgets.filter((widget) => genericSearch(widget, query).map(...)}
{people.filter((person) => genericSearch(person, query).map(...)}
</>

Our `genericSearch` function will accept the object itself, as well as some sort of query to use to actually filter for the values.


Let’s start writing our `genericSearch` function. First, we need to create a new folder called `utils` and then a new file `genericSearch.ts`. We can start by writing the signature of the function.
We know that the function will be generic since it will be able to sort objects of any type. So, we can go ahead and add the `<T>` and the object, which is of type `T`.



Learn how to build a generic search function in TypeScript.

Introduction

TypeScript Generics Introduction

Creating Mock Data for the Application

Building a Generic Search Function and UI Component

Building a Generic Sort Function and UI Component

Building a Generic Filter Function and UI Component

Generics in TypeScript

Organizing Everything into a Single Generic Component

Create a Content Management System (CMS)

Course Review and Final Comments

Appendix

Crafting a Generic Search Function

What is search, really?