Proposal for standardising getWrappedInstance methods on wrappers

[horyd]

I've come into this issue once or twice now, primarily as a result of the amount of component wrappers a given React component can accumulate. Right now I have some with connect (react-redux), injectIntl (react-intl) and withStyles (isomorphic-style-loader) all at once.

So if you have a component that is wrapped three times, and you want to get to the last wrapped instance, you need to do this.refs.component.getWrappedInstance().getWrappedInstance().getWrappedInstance()...

It would be nice for there to be a standard for how you might access wrapped instances where there are multiple levels at play. This concept proposes something like this.refs.yourComponent.getWrappedInstance(3) to do that. I also like the idea of having a means to go all the way down to the last component without necessarily having to specify the amount of layers to unwrap. Just an idea.

I'm posting this here as I think this library has the popularity to set a good standard with how this might be done, which others could follow.

Let me know thoughts :)

[gaearon]

Hi, thanks for PR! I don’t think we’d want to enforce a convention like this here.

Really, the core issue is that React doesn’t allow forwarding refs.
There is an issue for this, so you can track it here: facebook/react#4213.

[horyd]

Ah I see, hadn't come across that before but good to see an ongoing conversation on the topic :) Thanks!