React Native: Working With State

When working with React, in this case React Native, there are times when you might need a value to be globally accessible by a particular component and you, for some reason as it suits your application, want to constantly update that value.

React provides a sleek way of doing so using states. React lets you update that value as it’s necessary for your application to run, and then we say you’re updating the state of that object variable.

How Do You Set State?

States can be initialized in the constructor. Usually, you would set it to an initial value which sometimes can even be empty, but that depends on the logic of your application.

constructor(props){
super(props){
this.state = {
name: '',
}
}
}

Also note that you can set more than one state value.

How Do You Access State?

Values stored in the state are more or less objects and can be accessed using this keyword, e.g., this.state.name.

In JSX we often access and print out variables in curly braces, and the same means apply to printing out state values as well.

Let’s see a quick example

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { View, Text } from 'react-native';


class YourClassName extends Component{

//Intialize state
constructor(props){
super(props){
this.state = {
name: '';
}

//Update state
this.setState({name: 'Lawson Luke'});

render(){
return(
<View>
<Text>{this.state.name}</Text> //Lawson Luke
</View>
)
}
}

export default YourClassName;