"Shawn, props are also immutable in React. In most of the cases, the child component just uses props passed by the parent component. However, sometimes we want to extend the incoming props with some new data before rendering the child component. It's a typical use case to update styles and CSS classes. React provides an addon to clone a component and extending its props. It's called the cloneWithProps addon." said Mike.
"Mike, that addon is deprecated. I had looked at it in the past and React has deprecated it. It also has lot of issues related to refs of the child component not getting passed to the newly-cloned child components," Shawn informed.
"True. However, React also has a top-level React.cloneElement API method, which allows us to clone and extend a component. It has a very simple API and it can be used instead of the cloneWithProps addon." Mike explained.
React.cloneElement(element, props, …children);
"This method can be used to clone the given element and merge the...
