React and React Native

Chapter 8. Extending Components

In this chapter, you'll learn how to add new capabilities to existing components by extending them. There are two React mechanisms that you can use to extend a component, and we'll look at each in turn:

• Component inheritance
• Composition with higher-order components

We'll start by looking at basic component inheritance, just like the good old object-oriented class hierarchies that you're used to. Then we'll implement some higher-order components used as the ingredients in React component composition.

Component inheritance

Components are just classes. In fact, when you implement a component using ES2015 class syntax, you extend the base Component class from React. You can keep on extending your classes like this to create ...