Comparing Previous useEffect Values in React

With functional components now being the standard in React, we lost one notable perk of using the lifecycle hooks (such as componentDidUpdate()) of class-based components: the intrinsic ability to compare previous values to new ones.

If I wanted to respond to a component's "count" change for example, I could do something like:

componentDidUpdate(prevProps, prevState) {
  if (this.props.count > prevProps.count) {
    // Count incremented! Do something.
  }
}

I came across the need to do this while working on Emoji Battle yesterday—I wanted to show an animation anytime an emoji's vote count incremented.

Luckily Stack Overflow had a great solution as usual, which I turned into a hook I'll probably reuse in the future.

Basically you create a very simple custom hook that uses a React ref to track the previous value, and refer to it in the useEffect.

function usePreviousValue(value) {
  const ref = useRef();
  useEffect(() => {
    ref.current = value;
  });
  return ref.current;
}

Based on this, I used it to increment my Emoji counter as follows:

export const Count = ({ value }) => {
  const controls = useAnimation();
  const previousValue = usePreviousValue(value);

  useEffect(() => {
    if (!previousValue || value > previousValue) {

      // Trigger the framer-motion animation
      controls.start({
        scale: [1, 1.5, 1],
        transition: {
          duration: 0.5,
        },
      });
    }
  }, [value]);

Try this usePreviousValue hook out next time you need to track value changes in React functional components.