How to use short-circuit rendering in React
Łukasz Holeczek
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Short-circuit rendering provides a clean and concise way to conditionally display components in React without verbose ternary operators or if statements.
As the creator of CoreUI, a widely used open-source UI library, I’ve used short-circuit rendering in thousands of conditional display scenarios over 25 years of development.
From my expertise, the most effective approach is using the logical AND operator && to render components only when conditions are truthy.
This creates readable JSX that clearly expresses conditional rendering intent.
Use logical AND operator for clean conditional rendering in JSX.
return (
<div>
{isLoggedIn && <UserProfile />}
{items.length > 0 && <ItemList items={items} />}
</div>
)
Here the && operator evaluates the left side first. If isLoggedIn is truthy, React renders the UserProfile component. If falsy, nothing renders. The second example shows checking array length before rendering the list component. This pattern works because JavaScript’s short-circuit evaluation stops at the first falsy value.
Best Practice Note:
This is the same conditional rendering pattern we use throughout CoreUI React components for clean template logic.
Be careful with numbers and strings as conditions - use explicit boolean conversion like !!items.length if you need to avoid rendering 0 or empty strings in your UI.
