TypeScript and React - children type?

Question

I have a very simple functional component as follows:

import * as React from \'react\';

export interface AuxProps  { 
    children: React.ReactNode
 }


con         


        

Answer 1

You can use ReactChildren and ReactChild:

import React, { ReactChildren, ReactChild } from 'react';

interface AuxProps {
  children: ReactChild | ReactChildren;
}

const Aux = ({ children }: AuxProps) => (<div>{children}</div>);

export default Aux;

Answer 2

As a type that contains children, I'm using:

type ChildrenContainer = Pick<JSX.IntrinsicElements["div"], "children">

This children container type is generic enough to support all the different cases and also aligned with the ReactJS API.

So, for your example it would be something like:

const layout = ({ children }: ChildrenContainer) => (
    <Aux>
        <div>Toolbar, SideDrawer, Backdrop</div>
        <main>
            {children}
        </main>
    <Aux/>
)

Answer 3

The function component return type is limited to JSXElement | null in TypeScript. This is a current type limitation, pure React allows more return types.

Minimal demonstration snippet

You can either use a type assertion or Fragments as workaround:

const Aux = (props: AuxProps) => <>props.children</>; 
const Aux2 = (props: AuxProps) => props.children as ReactElement; 

---

ReactNode

children: React.ReactNode might be suboptimal, if the goal is to have strong types for Aux.

Almost anything can be assigned to current ReactNode type, which is equivalent to {} | undefined | null. A safer type for your case could be:

interface AuxProps {
  children: ReactElement | ReactElement[]
}

Example:

Given Aux needs React elements as children, we accidently added a string to it. Then above solution would error in contrast to ReactNode - take a look at the linked playgrounds.

Typed children are also useful for non-JSX props, like a Render Prop callback.

Answer 4

From the TypeScript site: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/6471

The recommended practice is to write the props type as {children?: any}

That worked for me. The child node can be many different things, so explicit typing can miss cases.

There's a longer discussion on the followup issue here: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/13618, but the any approach still works.

Answer 5

This has always worked for me:

type Props = {
  children: JSX.Element;
};

Answer 6

These answers appear to be outdated - React now has a built in type PropsWithChildren<{}>. It is defined similarly to some of the correct answers on this page:

type PropsWithChildren<P> = P & { children?: ReactNode };