Summary of the method to avoid white screen phenomenon in React application

introduce

When developing React applications, we have all encountered such a scenario: an uncaught exception suddenly interrupts the rendering process of the component, causing the user interface to appear blank, which is commonly known as the "white screen" phenomenon. This user experience is undoubtedly disastrous. Fortunately, React provides a range of tools and strategies to help us handle these errors gracefully, ensuring the robustness and user experience of the application. This article will explore how to effectively capture and deal with these errors in React applications to avoid the occurrence of white screen phenomenon.

1. Basics: try-catch block

The most direct way is to use it around blocks of code that may have errorstry-catch. Although this approach is feasible in specific methods of function components or class components, it is not efficient for error management of the entire React component tree.

function MyComponent() {
  try {
    // An error code may be thrown    const result = someFunctionThatMightThrow();
    return <div>{result}</div>;
  } catch (error) {
    ("Catched error", error);
    return <div>An error occurred，Please try again。</div>;
  }
}

2. Error Boundaries

React introduces the concept of "Error Boundary", a React component that captures and prints JavaScript errors that occur anywhere in its child component tree, and, it renders the alternate UI instead of those crashed child component trees. Error boundaries are an effective mechanism in React to handle UI layer errors.

How to create an error boundary

An error boundary component requires manual implementation of three lifecycle methods:getDerivedStateFromError, componentDidCatch, and must be defined as a class component.

class ErrorBoundary extends  {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
     = { hasError: false };
  }

  static getDerivedStateFromError(error) {
    // Update state so that the next render can display the downgraded UI    return { hasError: true };
  }

  componentDidCatch(error, errorInfo) {
    // You can also report the error log to the server    logErrorToMyService(error, errorInfo);
  }

  render() {
    if () {
      // You can customize the downgraded UI and render it      return <h1>sorry，Some errors have occurred。</h1>;
    }

    return ; 
  }
}

Then, wrap the components in your app that may throw errors:

<ErrorBoundary>
  <MyWidget />
</ErrorBoundary>

3. Error Handling of React 16+

Starting with React 16, React adopts the Fiber architecture, making the error boundaries more powerful. Now, React can capture errors in the entire component tree, not just in the rendering stage, but also event processors, asynchronous code, etc.

4. Global Error Handling

For exceptions that are not caught by error boundaries (such as errors thrown in code outside of React lifecycle methods), you can listen to the globalunhandledrejectionanderrorEvents to capture:

('error', (event) => {
  ("Global Error Catch:", );
});

('unhandledrejection', (event) => {
  ("Unprocessed Promise Rejected:", );
});

Summarize

Through the above method, we can effectively reduce the white screen problems caused by uncaught errors in React applications and improve the user experience. Error boundaries are a key tool for handling UI layer errors, while global error listening provides a last line of defense to ensure that even the most unpredictable errors are handled properly. Remember, a good error handling mechanism is an integral part of high-quality applications.

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