Usually, a component's children (this.props.children
) is an array of components:
/** @jsx React.DOM */
var GenericWrapper = React.createClass({
componentDidMount: function() {
console.log(Array.isArray(this.props.children)); // => true
},
render: function() {
return <div />;
}
});
React.renderComponent(
<GenericWrapper><span/><span/><span/></GenericWrapper>,
mountNode
);
However, when there is only a single child, this.props.children
will be the single child component itself without the array wrapper. This saves an array allocation.
/** @jsx React.DOM */
var GenericWrapper = React.createClass({
componentDidMount: function() {
console.log(Array.isArray(this.props.children)); // => false
// warning: yields 5 for length of the string 'hello', not 1 for the
// length of the non-existant array wrapper!
console.log(this.props.children.length);
},
render: function() {
return <div />;
}
});
React.renderComponent(<GenericWrapper>hello</GenericWrapper>, mountNode);
To make this.props.children
easy to deal with, we've provided the React.Children utilities.