Delve into TypeScript generics and learn to build reusable functions and React components for searching, sorting, and filtering data, enhancing both business logic and UI efficiency.

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TypeScript’s generics are a powerful tool that enables developers to ensure their code is flexible and reusable. Using generics can help developers manage exactly what types are used in functions and components around the application.

In this course, we’ll first get an overview of TypeScript generics and create generic search and sort functions. Next, we’ll create a React component for searching that would leverage our generic search function. Then, we’ll create a generic function and a React component for sorting and filtering, respectively. Finally, we’ll bring all these functionalities together to create one component that can manage searching, sorting, and filtering of any data passed to it.

By the end of this course, you'll know how to write generic TypeScript functions and craft React components that use TypeScript generics. You’ll also be able to deploy concise solutions in both business logic and user interface senses for searching, sorting, and filtering data on client side in applications.

Building User Interfaces and Functions with TypeScript and React

It’s time to create the final generic functionality in this course—generic filtering. Filtering is like searching in that we’ll utilize JavaScript’s built-in `filter` function, but our `predicate` function will be more complex.

# Filtering vs. Searching and Sorting
In some ways, filtering isn’t as intuitive as search or sort. For example, let’s consider a property that is of type `string`. There are numerous edge cases we have to consider. For example, what do we do with properties that have any empty string value, like `""`? What do we do if the value is `null`? What if it’s undefined? 
There are a few options available to us. We could remove these empty `null` and `undefined` values entirely or perhaps choose to keep the empty string values ("") and remove only `null` or `undefined` values. These choices will depend on the specific use case of what we are building. 

Let’s start with the signature of our new `genericFilter()` function.

Build a generic filter function with TypeScript.

Introduction

TypeScript Generics Introduction

Creating Mock Data for the Application

Building a Generic Search Function and UI Component

Building a Generic Sort Function and UI Component

Building a Generic Filter Function and UI Component

Generics in TypeScript

Organizing Everything into a Single Generic Component

Create a Content Management System (CMS)

Course Review and Final Comments

Appendix

Crafting a Generic Filter Function

Filtering vs. Searching and Sorting