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implementing Event Delegation: Click Event Not Firing on Dynamically Created Elements in React

πŸ‘€ Views: 19 πŸ’¬ Answers: 1 πŸ“… Created: 2025-06-12
react event-delegation hooks JavaScript

I've been banging my head against this for hours. I've been working on this all day and I'm working on a personal project and I tried several approaches but none seem to work... I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm working with a frustrating scenario with event delegation in my React application. I've set up a list of items that can be dynamically added and removed from the DOM. However, the click events on these newly added items are not firing as expected. I'm using React 17 and functional components with hooks. Here's the relevant snippet of my component: ```javascript import React, { useState } from 'react'; const ItemList = () => { const [items, setItems] = useState([]); const addItem = () => { setItems((prevItems) => [...prevItems, `Item ${prevItems.length + 1}`]); }; const handleClick = (item) => { alert(`You clicked on ${item}`); }; return ( <div> <button onClick={addItem}>Add Item</button> <ul> {items.map((item, index) => ( <li key={index} onClick={() => handleClick(item)}>{item}</li> ))} </ul> </div> ); }; export default ItemList; ``` When I add new items, they appear in the list, but clicking on them doesn’t trigger the `handleClick` function. I’ve confirmed that the `handleClick` function is defined properly and is being invoked for the initial items. I also tried adding the event handler directly in the JSX with an inline function as shown, but it still doesn't work. I suspect it might be related to how React handles the virtual DOM or something with the event system, but I’m not sure. I even tried using a ref to attach the click handler manually, but that didn't resolve the scenario either. Is there a step I'm missing here, or any best practices for handling events on dynamically rendered elements in React? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! My development environment is Windows. Any ideas what could be causing this? My development environment is Windows. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm working on a application that needs to handle this. I'm working on a mobile app that needs to handle this. I recently upgraded to Javascript 3.9. How would you solve this? I'm working in a Windows 11 environment. What's the correct way to implement this? What's the best practice here?