How to extend styles in React-Native?

By | August 12, 2018

We will create different styles to style different components, correct?

And most of them will have duplicate elements, correct?

What are the disadvantages of this problem?

  • You will clutter your file with duplicate lines of code.
  • It will increase the file size and increase the application size.
  • Not very efficient way of coding.
  • Limited reusability.

How to fix that?

Example

Here I am going to style two text components and this is my style…

	const text1Style = {
	  fontFamily: myFont,
	  marginTop: '15%',
	  textAlign: 'center'
	  fontSize: 28,
	  fontWeight: 'bold'
	};

	const text2Style =  {
	  fontFamily: myFont,
	  marginTop: '15%',
	  textAlign: 'center'
	  marginBottom: '20%',
	  fontSize: 20
	};
  

Now what we can do to fix it?

Its simple…create a parent style and inherit from it. Its not hard as it seems…
The above code can be transformed like this.

	// Common style for two texts //
	const parentTextStyle = {
	  fontFamily: myFont,
	  marginTop: '15%',
	  textAlign: 'center'
	};

	const text1Style = {
	  ...parentTextStyle,
	  fontSize: 28,
	  fontWeight: 'bold'
	};

	const text2Style =  {
	  ...parentTextStyle,
	  marginBottom: '20%',
	  fontSize: 20
	};
  

In this way you can extend it to any number of components and even across the application by defining it in a styles file.

Render

The render will look like this

  render() {
    return (
      <View style={containerStyle}>
          <Text style={text1Style}>
              { text1 }
          </Text>
          <Text style={text2Style}>
              { text2 }
          </Text>
      </View>
    );
    

Much cleaner code. Thats it…
Please leave your valuable comments.

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