JSX In Depth

Fundamentally, JSX just provides syntactic sugar for the React.createElement(component, props, ...children) function. The JSX code:

<MyButton color="blue" shadowSize={2}>
  Click Me
</MyButton>

compiles into:

React.createElement(
  MyButton,
  {color: 'blue', shadowSize: 2},
  'Click Me'
)

You can also use the self-closing form of the tag if there are no children. So:

<div className="sidebar" />

compiles into:

React.createElement(
  'div',
  {className: 'sidebar'}
)

If you want to test out how some specific JSX is converted into JavaScript, you can try out the online Babel compiler.

Specifying The React Element Type

The first part of a JSX tag determines the type of the React element.

Capitalized types indicate that the JSX tag is referring to a React component. These tags get compiled into a direct reference to the named variable, so if you use the JSX <Foo /> expression, Foo must be in scope.

React Must Be in Scope

Since JSX compiles into calls to React.createElement, the React library must also always be in scope from your JSX code.

For example, both of the imports are necessary in this code, even though React and CustomButton are not directly referenced from JavaScript:

import React from 'react';import CustomButton from './CustomButton';
function WarningButton() {
  // return React.createElement(CustomButton, {color: 'red'}, null);  return <CustomButton color="red" />;
}

If you don’t use a JavaScript bundler and loaded React from a <script> tag, it is already in scope as the React global.

Using Dot Notation for JSX Type

You can also refer to a React component using dot-notation from within JSX. This is convenient if you have a single module that exports many React components. For example, if MyComponents.DatePicker is a component, you can use it directly from JSX with:

import React from 'react';

const MyComponents = {
  DatePicker: function DatePicker(props) {
    return <div>Imagine a {props.color} datepicker here.</div>;
  }
}

function BlueDatePicker() {
  return <MyComponents.DatePicker color="blue" />;}

User-Defined Components Must Be Capitalized

When an element type starts with a lowercase letter, it refers to a built-in component like <div> or <span> and results in a string 'div' or 'span' passed to React.createElement. Types that start with a capital letter like <Foo /> compile to React.createElement(Foo) and correspond to a component defined or imported in your JavaScript file.

We recommend naming components with a capital letter. If you do have a component that starts with a lowercase letter, assign it to a capitalized variable before using it in JSX.

For example, this code will not run as expected:

import React from 'react';

// Wrong! This is a component and should have been capitalized:function hello(props) {  // Correct! This use of <div> is legitimate because div is a valid HTML tag:
  return <div>Hello {props.toWhat}</div>;
}

function HelloWorld() {
  // Wrong! React thinks <hello /> is an HTML tag because it's not capitalized:  return <hello toWhat="World" />;}

To fix this, we will rename hello to Hello and use <Hello /> when referring to it:

import React from 'react';

// Correct! This is a component and should be capitalized:function Hello(props) {  // Correct! This use of <div> is legitimate because div is a valid HTML tag:
  return <div>Hello {props.toWhat}</div>;
}

function HelloWorld() {
  // Correct! React knows <Hello /> is a component because it's capitalized.  return <Hello toWhat="World" />;}

Choosing the Type at Runtime

You cannot use a general expression as the React element type. If you do want to use a general expression to indicate the type of the element, just assign it to a capitalized variable first. This often comes up when you want to render a different component based on a prop:

import React from 'react';
import { PhotoStory, VideoStory } from './stories';

const components = {
  photo: PhotoStory,
  video: VideoStory
};

function Story(props) {
  // Wrong! JSX type can't be an expression.  return <components[props.storyType] story={props.story} />;}

To fix this, we will assign the type to a capitalized variable first:

import React from 'react';
import { PhotoStory, VideoStory } from './stories';

const components = {
  photo: PhotoStory,
  video: VideoStory
};

function Story(props) {
  // Correct! JSX type can be a capitalized variable.  const SpecificStory = components[props.storyType];  return <SpecificStory story={props.story} />;}

Props in JSX

There are several different ways to specify props in JSX.

JavaScript Expressions as Props

You can pass any JavaScript expression as a prop, by surrounding it with {}. For example, in this JSX:

<MyComponent foo={1 + 2 + 3 + 4} />

For MyComponent, the value of props.foo will be 10 because the expression 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 gets evaluated.

if statements and for loops are not expressions in JavaScript, so they can’t be used in JSX directly. Instead, you can put these in the surrounding code. For example:

function NumberDescriber(props) {
  let description;
  if (props.number % 2 == 0) {    description = <strong>even</strong>;  } else {    description = <i>odd</i>;  }  return <div>{props.number} is an {description} number</div>;
}

You can learn more about conditional rendering and loops in the corresponding sections.

String Literals

You can pass a string literal as a prop. These two JSX expressions are equivalent:

<MyComponent message="hello world" />

<MyComponent message={'hello world'} />

When you pass a string literal, its value is HTML-unescaped. So these two JSX expressions are equivalent:

<MyComponent message="&lt;3" />

<MyComponent message={'<3'} />

This behavior is usually not relevant. It’s only mentioned here for completeness.

Props Default to “True”

If you pass no value for a prop, it defaults to true. These two JSX expressions are equivalent:

<MyTextBox autocomplete />

<MyTextBox autocomplete={true} />

In general, we don’t recommend not passing a value for a prop, because it can be confused with the ES6 object shorthand {foo} which is short for {foo: foo} rather than {foo: true}. This behavior is just there so that it matches the behavior of HTML.

Spread Attributes

If you already have props as an object, and you want to pass it in JSX, you can use ... as a “spread” syntax to pass the whole props object. These two components are equivalent:

function App1() {
  return <Greeting firstName="Ben" lastName="Hector" />;
}

function App2() {
  const props = {firstName: 'Ben', lastName: 'Hector'};
  return <Greeting {...props} />;}

You can also pick specific props that your component will consume while passing all other props using the spread syntax.

const Button = props => {
  const { kind, ...other } = props;  const className = kind === "primary" ? "PrimaryButton" : "SecondaryButton";
  return <button className={className} {...other} />;
};

const App = () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <Button kind="primary" onClick={() => console.log("clicked!")}>
        Hello World!
      </Button>
    </div>
  );
};

In the example above, the kind prop is safely consumed and is not passed on to the <button> element in the DOM. All other props are passed via the