It’s essential to understand that an event is an action or occurrence, such as a mouse click or keystroke, recognized by software.

React elements cannot directly work with browsers’ DOM (Document Object Model). Instead, they work with a virtual DOM. Hence, React has its own event system, SyntheticEvent, which is fully compatible with the W3C object model.

SyntheticEvent is a cross-browser wrapper around the browser’s native event. Its API resembles that of the browser’s native event, including stopPropagation() and preventDefault(), except the events work identically across all browsers.

This helps ensure that an event’s properties exhibit consistent behavior across different browsers.

React Event System: Key Characteristics

Event Pooling

React efficiently implements the event system by employing event pooling. This approach enables React to reuse event objects for better performance and lower memory consumption. When an event occurs, React wraps this event in a SyntheticEvent instance and reuses the pool of events, nullifying all properties after the event callback has been invoked.

Binding

Custom components often require the use of event handlers. In JavaScript classes, methods are not bound by default. This means that in your event handlers, ‘this’ keyword is undefined. However, React necessitates binding of event handlers to ‘this’ in the constructor of your component. Using an arrow function eliminates the need for this binding.

Event Delegation

React harnesses event delegation wherever possible to improve performance. Rather than assigning event handlers to individual nodes, event handlers are assigned at the top level of the application, and a single event listener listens to all events of a specific type.

Event Handling in React

In HTML, the event name is often written in lowercase, but in React, event handlers such as onClick, onChange, and onKeyPress are camel-cased. In HTML, a function is stated as a string, but in React, that function appears as a JSX statement.

In an example class component, when a button is clicked, it will call the ‘handleClick’ method:

class SampleComponent extends React.Component {
  handleClick() {
    console.log(‘Button clicked’)
  }

  render() {
    return <button onClick={this.handleClick}>Click Mebutton>
  }
}

In this case, React’s onClick event handler is directly linked to the button’s click event. It’s important to note that the method ‘handleClick’ is not bound to the instance in a class component, and you may need to bind it manually.

Conclusion

React’s event-handling approach provides a robust and efficient mechanism that ensures smooth, high-performing, and consistent interactions in your web designs.

React simplifies the event-handling process by providing a synthetic event system and a method of binding and handling events. It also bridges the behavior gap across different browsers. With a good grasp of how this process operates, you can exploit the power of React to create more dynamic and interactive user interfaces in your applications.