React indeterminate

By  on  

I've fallen in love with React.js and JSX over the years; state-based rendering and a logical workflow have made me see the light of this modern framework. That doesn't mean I don't sometimes get a bit frustrated that the "simple" things seem harder than they should be. Getting a reference to an element and modifying its properties used to be simple but now you have to take into account you don't usually have element references -- you need to think in a different way. I learned this when I needed to set a checkbox's inderterminate property, a property not recognized via an attribute, one that requires a handle on the element and setting a property directly.

To add the indeterminate property to the checkbox, I needed to take advantage of the ref attribute:

const { value, checked, indeterminate } = this.props

return render(
    <input
        type="checkbox"
        value={value}
        checked={checked}
        ref={el => el && (el.indeterminate = indeterminate)}
    />
)

Since the ref is run on each render, the indeterminate property is updated appropriately, and thus the checkbox appears as expected.

Regardless of how amazing your framework appears, there's always a blind spot that requires a bit of a hack to accomplish what's expected. That's what a framework does, though: gives you 99% of what you need and makes the 1% difficult!

Recent Features

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi &#8211; Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    Create a Photo Stack Effect with Pure CSS Animations or MooTools

    My favorite technological piece of Google Plus is its image upload and display handling.  You can drag the images from your OS right into a browser's DIV element, the images upload right before your eyes, and the albums page displays a sexy photo deck animation...

Discussion

  1. BryanYang

    the last words are exactly. there is always something we miss when we design a framework. so the best way is to optimize again and again.

  2. > Since the ref is run on each render, the indeterminate property is updated appropriately, and thus the checkbox appears as expected.

    This is kind of true but it’s probably not working how you imagined in your head. The ref doesn’t actually get run each render, only when the component mounts/unmounts or the function passed to ref changes.

    In your example since you’re using an anonymous function this looks like a new function every time the component re-renders and so React will call it again. If you were to replace that ref with a function that doesn’t change every render (e.g ref={ this.setCheckboxRef }, this example would no longer work.

    This is the exact scenario described in the caveats section of the docs here: https://reactjs.org/docs/refs-and-the-dom.html#caveats-with-callback-refs

    Instead you want to assign the ref to a class property and listen to prop changes in componentDidUpdate and proxy them to the checkbox (if you’re using a class component) or use the new useEffect API in hooks.

  3. “gives you 99% of what you need and makes the 1% difficult!” This 1% never covers in any update…

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!