Passing custom props to router component in react-router v4

Question

I'm using React Router to create a multi page app. My main component is <App/> and it renders all of the routing to to child components. I'm trying to pass props via the route, and based on some research I did, the most common way for child components to tap into props passed down is via the this.props.route object that they inherit. However, this object is undefined for me. On my render() function in the child component, I console.log(this.props) and am return an object that looks like this

{match: Object, location: Object, history: Object, staticContext: undefined}

Doesn't look like the props I expected at all. Here is my code in detail.

Parent Component (I'm trying to pass the word "hi" down as a prop called "test" in all of my child components):

import { BrowserRouter as Router, HashRouter, Route, Switch } from 'react-router-dom';
import Link from 'react-router';
import React from 'react';

import Home from './Home.jsx';
import Nav from './Nav.jsx';
import Progress from './Progress.jsx';
import Test from './Test.jsx';



export default class App extends React.Component {

  constructor() {
    super();

    this._fetchPuzzle = this._fetchPuzzle.bind(this);
  }

  render() {
    return (
      <Router>
        <div>
          <Nav />
          <Switch>
            <Route path="/" exact test="hi" component={Home} />
            <Route path="/progress" test="hi" component={Progress} />             
            <Route path="/test" test="hi" component={Test} />
            <Route render={() => <p>Page not found!</p>} />
          </Switch>
        </div>
      </Router>
    );
  }
}

Child:

import React from 'react';
const CodeMirror = require('react-codemirror');
import { Link } from 'react-router-dom';

require('codemirror/mode/javascript/javascript')

require('codemirror/mode/xml/xml');
require('codemirror/mode/markdown/markdown');

export default class Home extends React.Component {

  constructor(props) {
    super(props);

    console.log(props)

  }

  render() {
    const options = {
      lineNumbers: true,  
      theme: 'abcdef'    
      // mode: this.state.mode
    };
    console.log(this.props)

    return (
      <div>
        <h1>First page bro</h1>        
        <CodeMirror value='code lol' onChange={()=>'do something'} options={options} />
      </div>);
  }
}

I'm pretty new to React so my apologies if I'm missing something obvious. Thanks!

What information do you want to extract from the route object? in react-router v4 you should be able to retrieve the same info from either match or location — Anthony Kong
@AnthonyKong I'm trying to extract the "test" property.<Route path="/" exact test="hi" component={Home} />. I was under the impression that the rendered <Home/> component would have access to an object that held this value. I looked into the match and location objects and didn't find my prop. — Mark Romano
Don't know why that value is not present, but alternative of that is, pass that value like this: <Route path="/test" render={(props) => <Test {...props} test="hi"/>} /> and access that by this.props.test. — Mayank Shukla
@MayankShukla Thank you. This delivered. Odd that the value wasn't present using the other technique. — Mark Romano

Shubham Khatri Shubham Khatri · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-30T07:15:29

You can pass props to the component by making use of the render prop to the Route and thus inlining your component definition. According to the DOCS:

This allows for convenient inline rendering and wrapping without the undesired remounting explained above.Instead of having a new React element created for you using the component prop, you can pass in a function to be called when the location matches. The render prop receives all the same route props as the component render prop

So you can pass the prop to component like

 <Route path="/" exact render={(props) => (<Home test="hi" {...props}/>)} />

and then you can access it like

this.props.test

in your Home component

P.S. Also make sure that you are passing {...props} so that the default router props like location, history, match etc are also getting passed on to the Home component otherwise the only prop that is getting passed down to it is test.

Passing custom props to router component in react-router v4

1 Answers