React Cookbook

Chapter 4. Interaction Design

In this chapter, we look at some recipes that address a bunch of typical interface problems. How do you deal with errors? How do you help people use your system? How do you create complex input sequences without writing a bunch of spaghetti code?

This is a collection of tips that we’ve found useful, time and again. At the end of the chapter, we look at various ways of adding animation to your application. We take a low-tech approach where possible, and ideally, the recipes we include will add meaning to your interface designs with a minimum of fuss.

4.1 Build a Centralized Error Handler

Problem

It’s hard to define precisely what makes good software good. But one thing that most excellent software has in common is how it responds to errors and exceptions. There will always be exceptional, unexpected situations when people are running your code: the network can disappear, the server can crash, the storage can become corrupted. It’s important to consider how you should deal with these situations when they occur.

One approach that is almost certain to fail is to ignore the fact that error conditions occur and to hide the gory details of what went wrong. Somewhere, somehow, you need to leave a trail of evidence that you can use to prevent that error from happening again.

When we’re writing server code, we might log the error details and return an appropriate message to a request. But if we’re writing client code, we need a plan for how we’ll deal with ...