Understanding useEffect Hook Design
Learn about the intricacies of React's useEffect hook, a tool for managing post-update callbacks and cleanup.
Overview of the useEffect
hook
The useEffect
hook in React is used to manage side effects in functional components. It allows us to perform tasks such as data fetching, DOM manipulation, etc.
The useEffect
hook is used to set up a callback to be invoked after an update:
const Title = () => {useEffect(() => {// Code to be executed when the component mountswindow.title = "Hello World";// Cleanup function to be executed when the component is unmountedreturn () => {window.title = "Notitle";};}, []); // Empty dependency array ensures the effect runs only on mount and unmount};
The useEffect
function takes a callback function called create
as its first input argument to define the effect. In the preceding example, the effect sets the window.title
to be Hello World
when the component is mounted.
A create
function can return a function called destroy
to perform the cleanup. The interesting thing here is that the destroy
function is provided by the create
function as a return value. In the preceding example, the cleanup returns the window.title
object back to NoTitle
when it is unmounted.
The second parameter in the useEffect
argument list is a dependency array called deps
. If deps
is not given, the effect gets invoked each time during each update, whereas when deps
is given, the effect only gets invoked upon a change from the deps
array.