Forms are a critical part of any web application, and creating a good user experience with them is important. In this blog post, we will explore how to create reusable form components with custom React hooks.

One of the benefits of using custom hooks is that they allow us to extract component logic into reusable functions. This can be especially useful when it comes to forms, as they often contain a lot of repetitive logic that can be abstracted into a hook.

To get started, let’s create a basic form component that accepts a name and an email address.

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This form component uses the useState hook to manage the state of the name and email fields. It also has a handleSubmit function that is called when the form is submitted, which logs the name and email values to the console.

Now, let’s say we want to reuse this form component in multiple places in our application, but with different fields. For example, we may want a version of the form that only has a name field, or a version that has additional fields like address and phone number.

To make our form component more flexible, we can create a custom hook that handles the logic for managing form fields.

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This hook takes an initial state object as an argument and returns an array containing the current fields state and a handleFieldChange function. The handleFieldChange function updates the fields state by spreading in the current fields and replacing the value of the field that was changed.

Now, we can use the useFormFields hook in our form component to manage the state of the fields.

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With this implementation, we can now easily reuse the form component with different fields by passing in a different initial state to the useFormFields hook. For example, to create a form with just a name field, we can do the following:

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Custom hooks are a powerful tool for creating reusable components in React. By extracting form field logic into a custom hook, we can easily create flexible form components that can be reused in multiple places in our application.

In addition to creating reusable form components, custom hooks can also be used to abstract other common form logic, such as validation and submission handling.

For example, we can create a useFormValidation hook that takes a validation function as an argument and returns a isValid boolean and a handleSubmit function. The handleSubmit function can then be used to handle the form submission, and the isValid boolean can be used to disable the submit button if the form is invalid.

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This hook can then be used in our form component like so:

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With this implementation, the submit button will be disabled if either the name or email fields are empty.

Custom hooks are a great way to create reusable and flexible form components in React. By abstracting common form logic into custom hooks, we can create components that are easier to maintain and reuse throughout our application.