Great work! You just passed information from a stateful component to a stateless component. You will be doing a lot of that.
You learned earlier that a component can change its state by calling this.setState()
. You may have been wondering: how does a component change its props?
The answer: it doesn’t!
A component should never update this.props
. Look at Bad.js to see an example of what not to do.
This is potentially confusing. props
and state
store dynamic information. Dynamic information can change, by definition. If a component can’t change its props
, then what are props
for?
A React component should use props
to store information that can be changed, but can only be changed by a different component.
A React component should use state
to store information that the component itself can change.
If that’s a bit confusing, don’t worry! The next two lessons will be examples.