Building Resilient React Applications with Error Boundaries

Published on March 17, 2024

Introduction

When building complex React applications, it’s essential to ensure that your application remains stable and functional even when unexpected errors occur. In this post, we’ll explore how React error boundaries can help you build more resilient applications.

Error boundaries are a feature introduced in React 16.3 that allows you to catch and handle errors in your components. By wrapping your components with an error boundary, you can prevent errors from propagating up the component tree and provide a better user experience.

Let’s start by creating a simple React application that includes an error boundary:

import { ErrorBoundary } from "react";

function App() {
  return (
    <ErrorBoundary>
      <h1>Hello World!</h1>
      <p>This is some sample text.</p>
    </ErrorBoundary>
  );
}

In this example, we’ve wrapped our App component with an ErrorBoundary from the react library. This will catch any errors that occur within the boundary and provide a default error message.

Understanding Error Boundary Props

Error boundaries also accept several props that allow you to customize their behavior:

• Fallback: A component to render when an error occurs.
• Resettable: Whether the error boundary should reset itself after handling an error.
• Child: The child component that’s wrapped by the error boundary.

Here’s an updated example that includes these props:

import { ErrorBoundary } from "react";

function App() {
  return (
    <ErrorBoundary
      Fallback={() => <h2>Error occurred!</h2>}
      Resettable={true}
      Child={
        <div>
          <p>This is some sample text.</p>
          <button onClick={() => throw new Error("Something went wrong!")}>
            Click me!
          </button>
        </div>
      }
    >
      <h1>Hello World!</h1>
    </ErrorBoundary>
  );
}

In this example, we’ve set the Fallback prop to a simple component that renders an error message. We’ve also set Resettable to true, which means that the error boundary will reset itself after handling an error.

Conclusion

Building resilient React applications with error boundaries requires careful planning and execution. By understanding how error boundaries work and customizing their behavior, you can create more stable and robust applications that provide a better user experience.