Building a Reusable Input Component
Explore how to build reusable input components in React that handle labels, values, changes, and errors to keep forms consistent and maintainable. Learn to manage form state in a parent component while the input components focus on display and interaction. Practice applying validation and styling to build scalable, predictable forms.
As our forms grow — think of sign-up pages, settings dashboards, or checkout flows — we’ll notice repeating patterns: labels, placeholders, input elements, and validation messages. Copying this logic everywhere leads to bloated code that’s hard to maintain.
React’s component-based architecture gives us a better way — we can extract this repeated logic into a reusable input component that accepts props for things like label, value, onChange, and error. This keeps our form code clean and consistent while reducing duplication.
Understanding reusable input components
A reusable input component acts as a controlled wrapper around a native <input>. It takes props from its parent (like value, onChange, label, and error) to keep data flow predictable and consistent.
Here’s the key flow: