Introducing useCatch: The Easy Way to Create Error Boundaries in Fiddlehead

Have you ever encountered a situation where a component in your React app throws an unexpected error and causes the entire app to break down? This can be a frustrating experience for both you as the developer and for your users.

Fortunately, you can handle such errors with error boundaries. Error boundaries are components that catch JavaScript errors anywhere in their child component tree, log those errors, and display a fallback UI instead of the component tree that crashed.

In React, to create an error boundary, you typically need to use a class component with methods such as componentDidCatch and getDerivedStateFromError. However, in Fiddlehead, creating an error boundary is much simpler. With the useCatch hook, you can easily catch errors during rendering and in hook callbacks in the subtree below, and provide a user-friendly message instead of a blank screen.

Here's an example of how to use the useCatch hook to create an error boundary in Fiddlehead:

import {useCatch} from 'fiddlehead';

export function ErrorBoundary({children}) {
  let [error, clearError] = useCatch();

  if (error !== null) {
    if (error instanceof Error) {
      return `${error.name}: ${error.message}`;
    }

    return 'Oops... Something went wrong!';
  }

  return children;
}

In the example above, the ErrorBoundary component uses the useCatch hook to catch errors during rendering and in hook callbacks in the subtree below. When an error occurs, it displays either the error name and message, or a user-friendly message of "Oops... Something went wrong!"

In addition to catching and displaying errors, you may also want to log the errors to a logging service. Here's an example of how you can use the useCatch hook to log errors to a logging service in the background:

import {useCatch, useEffect} from 'fiddlehead';
import {logErrorToService} from './logging';

export function ErrorBoundary({children}) {
  let [error, clearError] = useCatch();

  useEffect(() => {
    if (error !== null) {
      // Log the error to a logging service
      logErrorToService(error);
    }
  }, [error]);

  if (error !== null) {
    return 'Oops... Something went wrong!';
  }

  return children;
}

The name "useCatch" in Fiddlehead was inspired by the "catch" keyword in the traditional try-catch statement. Just as the "catch" keyword is used to handle errors in a try-catch block, the useCatch hook in Fiddlehead allows you to handle errors during the rendering of your components, or the execution of the callbacks of hooks (useEffect, useState,...), making it an error boundary for your application.

Similar to React, useCatch in Fiddlehead do NOT catch errors for:

• Errors that occur within event handlers
• Asynchronous errors, such as those that occur within setTimeout or requestAnimationFrame callbacks
• Errors that are thrown within the error boundary component itself, instead of its children components.

Whether you want to display a user-friendly message, log errors to a service, or both, the useCatch hook has you covered. So why not give Fiddlehead a try and transform your web development experience today?