Assigning value at useState() declaration vs useEffect()

user_13154520 0
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I have been using these two ways interchangeably however I am not sure which one is the more correct. their behavior seems to be the same but I am sure there is a use case for each. Anyone can help me understand what's the proper use for each case?

const [customer, setCustomers] = useState(props.location.state);

  useEffect(() => {
    setCustomers(props.location.state);
  }, []);
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4 Answers

You should normally stick to the first one. Calling the setter of useState may lead to undesired re-renders and decreased performance.

In the first block the customer is initialised directly and no re-render happens. The setCustomer method will change the state and rerender the component. In the end the whole function will run twice which you can verify with a console.log.

const [customer, setCustomers] = useState(0);

useEffect(() => {
  setCustomers(15);
}, []);

console.log(customer) // will first output 0 and then 15
user_86136300

Assuming in the second case, you have this as your useState statement:

const [customer, setCustomers] = useState();

The second one sets the value of customer on componentDidMount. So in the initial render, you will not have the appropriate value in your customer variable. But yes, very soon after that the correct value will be set because of the code written in useEffect.

To clear it up, there will be 2 renders here (because the state variable value changes). In the first one, that won't be the case since the state variable has only one value from beginning.

user_101401240

The first one is more effective.

const [customer, setCustomers] = useState(props.location.state);

If you use second one (by using useEffect), your component will be re-rendered again.

That's, your state variable customer will be updated in useEffect after DOM is initially rendered, this leads the 2nd re-render of the component.

But if you want customer to be updated by props.location.state, you need to add useEffect hook like the following.

useEffect(()=> {
    setCustomers(props.location.state);
}, [props.location.state]);
user_83091130

Setting the state's default value upon declaring it is probably the more correct way to go, since it does not trigger a re-render.

Every time you call a setState your component will be re-rendered, so when you do so in the useEffect, you will trigger an unnecessary re-render upon the component mounting, which could be avoided by doing the good ol'

const [value, setValue] = useState(props.location.state)

While of course there are exceptions and many different use cases, setting an initial state in a useEffect is more useful, for example, when you have values you'd expect to change regardless of your component (for example from an external asynchronous API call):

const [value, setValue] = useState(valueExpectedToChange)

useEffect(() => {
   setValue(valueExpectedToChange) // will trigger the rerender only when valueExpectedToChange changes
}, [valueExpectedToChange])
user_16760320
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