How to Add Conditional Class Rendering in Next JS
2022-04-24

Conditional class rendering is pretty simple, but I've had to think through it a few times and always forget how to do it immediately. Hopefully this helps me and will help you too.

In this example, I'm trying to render different classes based on whether or not there is an image prop passed to my PageTitle component. I'm using this to display the title and description on my site, but on the home page I have a .gif that I don't want on any other pages. So on the home page, I'm passing an image prop and on the other pages I'm not. I have conditional rendering statement adding a div as a child to flexbox if there is an image prop.

The issue I was trying to solve was my mobile display of the PageTitle component. If there was an image, then the text covered 2/3 of the screen and the image was next to it. All good there. But if there wasn't an image, the text still covered 2/3 of the screen and created an awkward empty space. So on mobile, if there was no image prop, I wanted to take the flex property off the container but put it back for larger breakpoints because I didn't want to description text to span the entire page container. So here's what I did.

The Solution

First, create a variable with a ternary operator to check whatever you want to check. In this case, if image was true, I wanted to add flex class. If image was false, I wanted to add flex-none and sm:flex breakpoint. sm-flex says "On break points larger than small, do this." flex-none is the behavior of all other breakpoints. In this case, just the xs breakpoint.

const PageTitle = ({title, description, image}) => {

const condition = image ? 'flex' : 'flex-none sm:flex'

Next, I added that ternary operator as a string template literal to my classes on the container rendering the component:

const PageTitle = ({title, description, image}) => {

const condition = image ? 'flex' : 'flex-none sm:flex'

return (
    <div className={`flex-row items-center ${condition}`}>

So if image is true, the flex container will be added as a className and the component will flex naturally. If it's false, on breakpoints smaller than small, it will be a normal, full-length row.

Note: If you don't have any classes there in both instances, you can just add the variable to the className and don't have to do a string template literal.

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