Many people get confused by the difference between components, their instances, and elements in React. Why are there three different terms to refer to something that is painted on screen?

If you’re new to React, you probably only worked with component classes and instances before. For example, you may declare a Button component by creating a class. When the program is running, you may have several instances of this component on screen, each with its own properties and local state. This is the traditional object oriented UI programming. Why introduce elements?

In this traditional UI model, it is up to you take care of creating and destroying child component instances. If a Form component wants to render a Button component, it needs to create its instance, and manually keep it up to date with any new information.

class Form extends TraditionalObjectOrientedView {

render() {

// Read some data passed to the view

const { isSubmitted, buttonText } = this.attrs; if (!isSubmitted && !this.button) {

// Form is not yet submitted. Create the button!

this.button = new Button({

children: buttonText,

color: 'blue'

});

this.el.appendChild(this.button.el);

} if (this.button) {

// The button is visible. Update its text!

this.button.attrs.children = buttonText;

this.button.render();

} if (isSubmitted && this.button) {

// Form was submitted. Destroy the button!

this.el.removeChild(this.button.el);

this.button.destroy();

} if (isSubmitted && !this.message) {

// Form was submitted. Show the success message!

this.message = new Message({ text: 'Success!' });

this.el.appendChild(this.message.el);

}

}

}

This is pseudocode, but this is more or less what you end up with when you try to write composable UI that behaves consistently in an object oriented way with a framework like Backbone.

Each component has to keep references to its DOM node and to the instances of the children components, and create, update, and destroy them when the time is right. The lines of code grow as the square of the number of possible states of the component, and the parents have direct access to their children component instances, making it hard to decouple them in the future.

Now let’s talk about React.

In React, this is where the elements come to rescue. An element is a plain object describing a component instance or DOM node and its desired properties. It contains only information about the component type (for example, a Button), its properties (for example, its color), and any child elements inside it.

An element is not an actual instance. Rather, it is a way to tell React what you want to see on the screen. You can’t call any methods on the element. It’s just an immutable description object with two fields: type: (string | Component) and props: Object.*

When the element’s type is a string, an element represents a DOM node with that tag name, and props correspond to its attributes. This is what React will render. For example:

{

type: 'button',

props: {

className: 'button button-blue',

children: {

type: 'b',

children: 'OK!'

}

}

}

Such an element is just a way to represent this HTML as a plain object:

<button class='button button-blue'>

<b>

OK!

</b>

</button>

Note how the elements can be nested. By convention, when we want to create an element tree, we specify one or more child elements as the children prop of their containing element.

What’s important is that both child and parent elements are just descriptions and not actual instances. They don’t refer to anything on the screen when you create them. You can create them and throw them away, and it won’t matter much.

React Elements are easy to traverse, don’t need to be parsed, and of course are much lighter than the actual DOM elements—they’re just objects!

However, the type of an element can also be a function or class corresponding to a React component:

{

type: Button,

props: {

color: 'blue',

children: 'OK!'

}

}

This is the core idea of React.

An element describing a component is also an element, just like an element describing the DOM node. They can be nested and mixed with each other.

This feature lets you define a DangerButton component as a Button with a specific color property value without worrying about whether Button renders to a button, a div, or something else entirely.

const DangerButton = ({ children }) => ({

type: Button,

props: {

color: 'red',

children: children

}

});

You can mix and match them later:

const DeleteAccount = () => ({

type: 'div',

props: {

children: [{

type: 'p',

props: {

children: 'Are you sure?'

}

}, {

type: DangerButton,

props: {

children: 'Yep'

}

}, {

type: Button,

props: {

color: 'blue',

children: 'Cancel'

}

}]

});

Or, if you prefer JSX:

const DeleteAccount = () => (

<div>

<p>Are you sure?</p>

<DangerButton>Yep</DangerButton>

<Button color='blue'>Cancel</Button>

</div>

);

This keeps components decoupled from each other, as they can express both is-a and has-a relationships exclusively through composition.

When React sees an element with a function or class type, it will know to ask that component what element it renders to with the given props.

When it sees

{

type: Button,

props: {

color: 'blue',

children: 'OK!'

}

}

React will ask Button what it renders to, and it will get

{

type: 'button',

props: {

className: 'button button-blue',

children: {

type: 'b',

children: 'OK!'

}

}

}

React will repeat this process until it knows the underlying DOM tag elements for every component on the page.

React is like a child asking “what is Y” for every “X is Y” you explain to them until they figure out every little thing in the world.

Remember the Form example above? It can be written in React as follows*:

const Form = ({ isSubmitted, buttonText }) => {

if (isSubmitted) {

// Form submitted! Return a message element.

return {

type: Message,

props: {

text: 'Success!'

}

};

} // Form still visible! Return a button element.

return {

type: Button,

props: {

children: buttonText,

color: 'blue'

}

};

};

That’s it! For a React component, props are the input, and an element tree is the output.

The returned element tree can contain both elements describing DOM nodes, and elements describing other components. This lets you compose independent parts of UI without relying on their internal DOM structure.

We let React create, update, and destroy instances. We describe them with elements we return from the components, and React takes care of managing the instances.

In the code above, Form, Message, and Button are React components. They can either be written as functions, as above, or as classes descending from React.Component:

class Button extends React.Component {

render() {

const { children, color } = this.props; // Return an element describing a

// <button><b>{children}</b></button> return {

type: 'button',

props: {

className: 'button button-' + color,

children: {

type: 'b',

props: {

children: children

}

}

}

};

}

}

When a component is defined as a class, it is a little more powerful than a functional component. It can store some local state and perform custom logic when the corresponding DOM node is created or destroyed. A functional component is less powerful but is simpler, and it acts like a class component with just a single render() method.

However, whether functions or classes, fundamentally they are all components to React. They take the props as their input, and return the elements as their output.

When you call

ReactDOM.render({

type: Form,

props: {

isSubmitted: false,

buttonText: 'OK!'

}

}, document.getElementById('root'));

React will ask the Form component what element tree it returns, given those props. It will gradually “refine” its understanding of your component tree in terms of simpler primitives:

// React: You told me this...

{

type: Form,

props: {

isSubmitted: false,

buttonText: 'OK!'

}

} // React: ...And Form told me this...

{

type: Button,

props: {

children: 'OK!',

color: 'blue'

}

} // React: ...and Button told me this! I guess I'm done.

{

type: 'button',

props: {

className: 'button button-blue',

children: {

type: 'b',

props: {

children: 'OK!'

}

}

}

}

At the end of this process React knows the result DOM tree, and a renderer like ReactDOM or React Native applies the minimal set of changes necessary to update the actual DOM nodes.

This gradual refining process is also the reason React apps are easy to optimize. If some parts of your component tree become too large for React to visit efficiently, you can tell it to skip this “refining” and diffing certain parts of the tree if the relevant props have not changed. It is very fast to calculate whether the props have changed if they are immutable, so React and immutability work great together, and can provide great optimizations with the minimal effort.

You might have noticed that I have talked a lot about components and elements, and not so much about the instances. The truth is, instances have much less importance in React than in most object oriented UI frameworks.

Only components declared as classes have instances, and you never create them directly: React does that for you. While there are mechanisms for a parent component instance to access a child component instance, they are only used for imperative actions (such as setting focus on a field), and should generally be avoided.

React will take care of creating an instance for every class component, so that you can write components in an object oriented way with methods and local state, but other than that, instances are not very important in the React’s programming model, and are managed by React itself.

Recap

An element is a plain object describing what you want to appear on the screen in terms of the DOM nodes or other components. Elements can contain other elements in their props.

A component can be two things. It can be a class with a render() method that inherits from React.Component . Or it can be a function. In both cases, it takes props as an input, and returns an element tree as the output.

When a component receives some props as an input, it is because a parent component returned an element with its type and these props. This is why people say that the props flows one way in React: from parents to children.

An instance is what you refer to as this in the component class you write. It is useful for storing local state and reacting to the lifecycle events.

Functional components don’t have instances at all. Class components have instances, but you never need to create a component instance directly—React takes care of this.

Finally, to create elements, use React.createElement(), JSX, or an element factory helper. I discourage you from writing them as plain objects in the real code—just know that they are plain objects under the hood.

Further Reading

Footnotes