Function inside render and class in reactjs

Question

I'm trying to learn reactjs and i have some uncertainties. I was refering react DOCS and some other tutorials and i saw functions are written inside render function and also inside class. What things should we do inside render function in react?

1st way

class App extends Component {

    test(user) {

        return user.firstName;
    }

    render() {

        const user = {
            firstName: 'Harper',
            lastName: 'Perez'
        };

        return (

            <div>

                <h1>{this.test(user)}</h1>

            </div>
        )
    }
}

2nd way

class App extends Component {

       render() {

        const user = {
            firstName: 'Harper',
            lastName: 'Perez'
        };

        function test(user) {

            return user.firstName;
        }

        return (

            <div>

                <h1>{test(user)}</h1>

            </div>

        )

    }
}

Both this methods work. But i want to know what is the best method to do this? Most importantly i want to know what kind of things i can do inside render function.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The render method normally gets called a lot of times. I think it is more performant to declare your functions outside of the render method if you can. See this answer for a more detailed explanation of the render method.

The test function in your example is a pure function, this allows you to declare it outside the scope/context of the react component altogether as it only needs access to the arguments that are passed in.

That said, it's perfectly fine to declare functions inside a render method or more commonly these days a functional component. There are hooks like useCallback that can help with performance but 99% of the time it's not an issue. Always remember that premature performance optimisation is the roof of all evil and you need to measure performance before you can improve it.

// helpers.js
const test = function(user) {
    return user.firstName;
}

// App.js
const App = () => {
  const user = {
    firstName: 'Harper',
    lastName: 'Perez'
  }

  return (
    <div>
      <h1>hello {test(user)}</h1>
    </div>
  )
}

Answer 2

I think it's ultimately your choice, but I personally prefer only putting functions within render that deal exclusively with rendering components and/or JSX (i.e. mapping over a prop, switch statements that conditionally load a proper component based on a prop, etc...). If the logic behind the function is heavy, I'll leave it out of render.

Here's an example. Say in your component you have a "users" prop that is supposed to display a list of users. You might have a render function with these types of things:

render(){
  
  // An array of user objects & a status string.
  const { users, status } = this.props;
  
  // Map users array to render your children:
  const renderUserList = () => {
    return users.map(user => {
      return <div>{ user.firstName }</div>;
    });
  };
  
  // Conditionally load a component:
  const renderStatus = () => {
    let component = '';
    switch(status){
      case 'loading':
        component = <Component1 />
        break;
      case 'error':
        component = <Component2 />
        break;
      case 'success':
        component = <Component3 />
        break;
      default:
        break;
    }
    
    return component;
  }
  
  // render() return:
  return(
    <div>
      <div className="status">
        { renderStatus() }
      </div>
      <div className="user-list">
        { renderUserList() }
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}

However, if you had a function that needed to somehow manipulate data about a user, it might be better to put that in a function outside of render.