Extending Styles

Quite frequently you might want to use a component, but change it slightly for a single case. Now, you could pass in an interpolated function and change them based on some props, but that's quite a lot of effort for overriding the styles once.

To easily make a new component that inherits the styling of another, just wrap it in the styled() constructor. Here we use the button from the last section and create a special one, extending it with some color-related styling:

react

// The Button from the last section without the interpolations
const Button = styled.button`
  color: #BF4F74;
  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 1em;
  padding: 0.25em 1em;
  border: 2px solid #BF4F74;
  border-radius: 3px;
`;

// A new component based on Button, but with some override styles
const TomatoButton = styled(Button)`
  color: tomato;
  border-color: tomato;
`;

render(
  <div>
    <Button>Normal Button</Button>
    <TomatoButton>Tomato Button</TomatoButton>
  </div>
);

We can see that the new TomatoButton still resembles Button, while we have only added two new rules.

In some cases you might want to change which tag or component a styled component renders. This is common when building a navigation bar for example, where there are a mix of anchor links and buttons but they should be styled identically.

For this situation, we have an escape hatch. You can use the "as" polymorphic prop to dynamically swap out the element that receives the styles you wrote:

react

const Button = styled.button`
  display: inline-block;
  color: #BF4F74;
  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 1em;
  padding: 0.25em 1em;
  border: 2px solid #BF4F74;
  border-radius: 3px;
  display: block;
`;

const TomatoButton = styled(Button)`
  color: tomato;
  border-color: tomato;
`;

render(
  <div>
    <Button>Normal Button</Button>
    <Button as="a" href="#">Link with Button styles</Button>
    <TomatoButton as="a" href="#">Link with Tomato Button styles</TomatoButton>
  </div>
);

This works perfectly fine with custom components too!

react

const Button = styled.button`
  display: inline-block;
  color: #BF4F74;
  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 1em;
  padding: 0.25em 1em;
  border: 2px solid #BF4F74;
  border-radius: 3px;
  display: block;
`;

const ReversedButton = props => <Button {...props} children={props.children.split('').reverse()} />

render(
  <div>
    <Button>Normal Button</Button>
    <Button as={ReversedButton}>Custom Button with Normal Button styles</Button>
  </div>
);