When to Choose for Custom Hooks in React
- Complex Logic Extraction: If your component has complex logic that involves multiple states, side effects, and computations, extracting that logic into a custom hook can make your component code cleaner and more maintainable.
- Reusability Across Components: When you find yourself duplicating code or logic across different components, consider creating a custom hook. This allows you to encapsulate the logic in one place and reuse it in various parts of your application.
- Abstraction of Concerns: If you want to abstract away certain concerns, such as handling forms, managing timers, or interfacing with external APIs, into a reusable unit, a custom hook provides a way to encapsulate that functionality.
- Improving Testability: Custom hooks can improve the testability of your code. By isolating specific functionality in a custom hook, you can write tests for that hook independently of the components using it.
- Avoiding Prop Drilling: If you find yourself passing down the same state and functions through multiple levels of component hierarchy, a custom hook can help by centralizing the logic and reducing prop drilling.
- Encapsulation of Side Effects: If you have side effects (e.g., data fetching, subscriptions, or interactions with external services), placing them in a custom hook allows you to encapsulate and manage those side effects separately from your components.
When is it best to use custom hooks instead of built-in React hooks?
Custom hooks in React are useful when you want to extract and reuse stateful logic across multiple components. While built-in React hooks like useState
, useEffect
, and useContext
cover many common scenarios, there are cases where creating custom hooks can enhance code organization, readability, and reusability.