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JavaScript React Basics (2018) Thinking in Components React Developer Tools

Tyler McDonald
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Tyler McDonald
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Graduate 16,700 Points

Why do we need React Developer Tools?

Since the chrome dev tools already shows the html markup rendered by React, what is the point of the React extension for a separate Dev tools?

In addition, React dev tools is not showing any information in the DOM tree except for the component names. It doesn't show classes or text inside of nodes.

Tyler McDonald
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Tyler McDonald
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Graduate 16,700 Points

I figured out my second issue. There's a filter that's set by default which hides many of the DOM elements in the Componenets tab. Removing that filter fixed the issue. This article from Codecademy helped me.

1 Answer

Torben Korb
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Torben Korb
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 91,433 Points

Hi Tyler,

the React dev tools show information specific to React components like state, props, source code and more additional profiling information. This can help debugging React applications a lot.

Also it seems the layout of the React dev tools extension changed a bit since the recording of the video. At least in the Chrome extension. But the principles are still the same for examining an application.

Hope this helps. Happy coding!