prevState is a name that you have given to the argument passed to setState callback function. What it holds is the value of state before the setState was triggered by React; Since setState does batching, its sometimes important to know what the previous state was when you want to update the new state based on the previous state value.
So if multiple setState calls are updating the same state, batching setState calls may lead to incorrect state being set. Consider an example:
state = {
count: 0
}
updateCount = () => {
this.setState({ count: this.state.count + 1});
this.setState({ count: this.state.count + 1});
this.setState({ count: this.state.count + 1});
this.setState({ count: this.state.count + 1});
}
In the above code you might expect the value of count to be 4 but it would actually be 1 since the last call to setState will override any previous value during batching. A way to solve this to use functional setState:
updateCount = () => {
this.setState(prevstate => ({ count: prevstate.count + 1}));
this.setState(prevstate => ({ count: prevstate.count + 1}));
this.setState(prevstate => ({ count: prevstate.count + 1}));
this.setState(prevstate => ({ count: prevstate.count + 1}));
}