React curly brace in variable declaration [duplicate]

Question

I recently followed a react tutorial to create a template project and have since been modifying code to fit my needs. In particular, there was this piece of code on a component that was passed a parameter called label.

render() {
  const { label } = this.props;
  ...
}

In this example, I returned a JSON object from a controller and passed it to this component using a parameter named rune. A property of the rune JSON is "name", and I wanted to assign the name to a variable called `label. One thing that gave me trouble was the following:

render() {
  console.log("Prop.runes.name: " + this.props.rune.name);
  const { label } = this.props.rune.name;
  console.log("Label: " + label);
  ...
}

The first console.log(...) outputs the name correctly. However, the second log was undefined. After some trial and error, I found that if I removed the curly braces from my const declaration the name resolved properly.

render() {
  const label = this.props.rune.name;
  ...
}

What were the curly braces originally doing? Is there a reason the tutorial initially had them?

Answer 1

What you ask here is not related to React actually, it is related to Javascript: Destructuring assignment.

For objects, you can destruct a property like that:

const obj = {
  name: "foo",
};

const { name } = obj;
console.log( name );

const name2 = obj.name;
console.log( name2 );

Above, both assignments are equal. First one is the shorthand of the second one.

For your example:

const { label } = this.props.rune.name;

Here, there is a this.props.rune.name.label property and you are destructing it from this.props.rune.name. This is equal to:

const label = this.props.rune.name.label;

not actually

const label = this.props.rune.name;

as you tried.

The related part of React with this syntax is we see it very frequently in React world. Like:

render() {
    const { foo, bar } = this.props;
    const { fizz, buzz } = this.state;
    return (
      <p>A {foo} goes to {bar} and orders a {fizz} without {buzz}</p>; 
    )   
}

or

const AComponent = ( { foo, bar } ) => (
  <p>{foo} loves {bar} in programming world.</p>
);

A caution. When dealing with nested properties to destruct being careful is important. Since as @Tyler Sebastian explained in the comments it is not null safe.

const data = { obj: { name : "foo"} };
const { obj: { name } } = data;

This is OK but if we have a typo there or if we try to use a property which does not exist at that time we get an error since we try to destruct a property from an undefined one.

const data = { obj: { name : "foo"} };
const { objx: { name } } = data;

This throws an error. Thanks to @Tyler Sebastian for the comment.