Custom ref prop type needs work

[juanca]

604c752

[ahuth]

Oh man, I've been dealing with this a lot at work. There is an issue about this in facebook/prop-types, and I've been meaning to try writing a custom prop type validator for them.

A lot of people do:

PropTypes.oneOfType([
    PropTypes.func, // for legacy refs
    PropTypes.shape({ current: PropTypes.instanceOf(Element) })
])

but the instanceOf(Element) breaks when server-side rendering.

[juanca]

Interesting. We would like to support server-side rendering as well. I wonder if we can shim Element in a server environment.

[juanca]

I've read some issues on this on other repositories and it seems that we do not need to do any further work.

A "ref" is suppose to be just house a pointer to something. While we traditionally use it for DOM references on a given React Element, it seems like it will be used for any asynchronous value.

I'll leave this issue around for a bit longer but it might not entail any future technical work besides some more concrete research.

[ahuth]

Immutable reference to a mutable value.

You're right, assuming Element is short-sighted. This became more clear for me with hooks, because the useRef hook is really nice for dealing with callback functions and timeout ids.