How to Define TypeScript Types in Your React Projects

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In this article, we'll explore the approaches to organizing TypeScript types when working with React projects.

How you organize your types impacts code maintainability and readability. Following good approaches helps to onboard others to your project and avoid technical debt.

Many developers create complex and unorganized type definitions, leading to difficult debugging, and hard-to-maintain code, especially in large-scale applications.

Choosing the right strategy for managing your TypeScript types is key to writing maintainable React code.

There are generally two popular approaches to managing types in React projects:

• Keeping all types in a central file

• Defining component-specific types directly within the component files.

Each approach has pros and cons, and the right choice often depends on the complexity of your project.

Centralized Type Definitions

In this approach, you create a dedicated types.ts file where all your types are defined, and you import them into the component files where needed.

When to Use Centralized Types

Centralized types make sense in projects where you have shared data models or multiple components using the same props. For example, if several components rely on a Price type, centralizing this will ensure consistency and reduce redundancy.

Component-Specific Type Definitions

In this approach, you define types directly within the component file, keeping the types closely related to the component.

When to Use Component-Specific Types

For small, isolated components that don't share types with others, defining types directly within the component keeps things simple and localized. It also reduces unnecessary imports.

Key Takeaways

• Centralized types are great for keeping your types in one place, making it easy to manage shared types across components.

• Component-specific types can make code easier to understand when components are independent, and type definitions are simple.

• Larger projects might benefit more from centralized types to avoid duplications and inconsistencies.

• Smaller projects or isolated components may find defining types within the component more efficient.

Conclusion

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for managing types in TypeScript and React projects.

If your project is small or your components are highly independent, it might make sense to define types directly within the component file.

For larger, more complex projects where types are shared across multiple components, centralizing your types can be a lifesaver.

Analyze the approaches and use the right one in each use case in your projects!

See you next Saturday!

Keep up the great work! :)