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Extending children with `React.Children` and `React.cloneElement`

You want your component to augment all its children with some props. To do so you can use React.Children.map and React.cloneElement, like so:


render() {
<div>
{
React.Children.map(
this.props.children,
child =>
React.cloneElement(child, {
value: '5'
})
)
}
</div>
}

When a child gets passed to our component, its value prop will be overwritten with 5.

What if instead we want the component to provide fallbacks if some properties are missing from the child? We can do so with a small tweak to our mapping function:

child =>
React.cloneElement(child, {
value: '5',
...child.props
});

...in which we put back any of the child props we might have overwritten.

Caveats

React.Children methods (map, forEach, etc.) expect renderable children: primitive values (string, number, boolean, null, undefined) or React elements. Objects in the children prop will throw an error, and functions are skipped over (making render props and React.Children.map incompatible).