useRef Hook in React

Welcome back again!

This is the fourth blog in the React Hook series, where we're learning about different hooks used in React, and our today's hook is the useRef hook. Before we get started, I'd recommend reading the last blogs of this series React Hooks. Though this hook is completely independent of we can read and learn it without any prior knowledge of hooks, it would be beneficial to have some basic understanding of the hooks.

What is useRef Hook

We can build a direct reference to a DOM element using the useRef hooks. It's used to keep track of mutable values that do not cause re-rendering every time they're changed.

Syntax:

const refContainer = useRef(intialValue)

Example:

const countRef = useRef(0)

useRef returns a mutable object whose current property can be used to access the value.
In the above syntax, we have initialized the useRef with the initial value of 0.

const countRef = {counter:0} is same as const count = useRef(0)

Difference between useState and useRef

We can see in the following codesandbox that using the useRef we can persist the previous value on every render. But using the same with useState is not possible.

Advantage of using useRef

• It allows us to directly access the DOM element without causing any issue.
• Values updated using useRef do not cause re-rendering.

Ending

That's all for this blog.  Continue reading this React hook series to learn more about React hooks. In the next blog, we'll look at the 'useReducer' hook, which is used to handle state management in React globally.
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Reference: W3Schools