I am trying to implement an EventEmitter/Subscriber relationship between two components in a react native class. I have seen referenced the following materials:
- React Native - Event Emitters by Colin Ramsay
- React Native - Call Function of child from NavigatorIOS
These solutions are adequate for what I am trying to accomplish, however, they bother require the use of mixins: [Subscribable.Mixin]
on the receiving component to work properly with Subscriber
. Unfortunately, I am using ES6 and extending my classes from Component
so I can not use this mixin syntax.
My question is: How can I implement the above solutions in ES6 without the use of mixins?
You don't need mixins to use EventEmitters.
Simple demo:
import EventEmitter from 'EventEmitter';
let x = new EventEmitter();
function handler(arg) {
console.log(`event-name has occurred! here is the event data arg=${JSON.stringify(arg)}`);
}
x.addListener('event-name', handler);
x.emit('event-name', { es6rules: true, mixinsAreLame: true });
The full signature for addListener
takes three args:
EventEmitter.addListener(eventName, handler, handlerContext)
In a react component, you likely want to use that context arg, so that the handler can be a class method instead of an inline function and still retain this == component instance
. E.g.:
componentDidMount() {
someEmitter.addListener('awesome', this.handleAwesomeEvents, this);
// the generalist suggests the alternative:
someEmitter.addListener('awesome', this.handleAwesomeEvents.bind(this));
}
handleAwesomeEvents = (event) => {
let awesomeness = event.awesomeRating;
// if you don't provide context in didMount,
// "this" will not refer to the component,
// and this next line will throw
this.setState({ awesomeness });
};
FYI: I got this from looking at the decidedly unmagical implementation of the infamous Subscribable mixin. Google search results are basically an echo chamber of Ramsay's single mixin-based demo.
P.S. As far as exposing this emitter to another component, I'd probably have the owning component provide a function for receiving the emitter reference, and the component that creates the emitter would then conditionally execute that prop with the emitter.
// owner's render method:
<ThingThatEmits
onEmitterReady={(emitter) => this.thingEmitter = emitter}
/>
// inside ThingThatEmits:
componentDidMount() {
this.emitter = new EventEmitter();
if(typeof this.props.onEmitterReady === 'function') {
this.props.onEmitterReady(this.emitter);
}
}
I was able to get a workaround with react-mixin. Not sure how proper it is, but it works without any modification. The key is adding reactMixin(DetailView.prototype, Subscribable.Mixin);
after the class definition.
Going off the example that is floating around for EventEmitter and Subscribable:
'use strict';
var reactMixin = require('react-mixin');
var React = require('react-native');
var EventEmitter = require('EventEmitter');
var Subscribable = require('Subscribable');
var {
AppRegistry,
StyleSheet,
Text,
View,
NavigatorIOS
} = React;
class MainView extends Component {
constructor(props){
super(props);
this.EventEmitter = new EventEmitter();
}
somethingHappenedFunction(){
this.EventEmitter.emit("update_event", { message: "hello from up here"});
}
//rest of the class
}
class DetailView extends Component {
componentDidMount(){
this.addListenerOn(this.props.events, 'update_event', this.miscFunction);
}
miscFunction(args) {
console.log("message: %s", args.message);
}
//rest of the class
}
reactMixin(DetailView.prototype, Subscribable.Mixin);