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JavaScript React by Example Building the Application Creating the Counter

Posted by Nick Trabue
Nick Trabue
Courses Plus Student 12,666 Points

What does isRequired do exactly?

Guil decided in this lesson that the numberAttending, numberUnconfirmed and totalInvited would not have the isRequired tag

    Counter.propTypes = {
        numberAttending: PropTypes.number,
        numberUnconfirmed: PropTypes.number,
        totalInvited: PropTypes.number
    };

However, the counter is always present in the DOM. What does making these optional do exactly? Why aren't they required unlike almost all of the other propTypes in this course? Maybe I'm just not understanding what isRequired actually does?

1 Answer

Abraham Juliot
Abraham Juliot
47,353 Points
Abraham Juliot
Abraham Juliot
47,353 Points

We may later decide to reuse and show the Counter component to not include props that compute values when the list is at an empty state.

isRequired will cause a warning to show if the prop is not provided. If you are interested, this is a snippet of isRequired in action from line 189 at https://github.com/facebook/prop-types/blob/master/factoryWithTypeCheckers.js

if (props[propName] == null) {
    if (isRequired) {
        if (props[propName] === null) {
            return new PropTypeError('The ' + location + ' `' + propFullName + '` is marked as required ' + ('in `' + componentName + '`, but its value is `null`.'));
        }
        return new PropTypeError('The ' + location + ' `' + propFullName + '` is marked as required in ' + ('`' + componentName + '`, but its value is `undefined`.'));
    }
    return null;
} else {
    return validate(props, propName, componentName, location, propFullName);
}