mobx-react
Package with react component wrapper for combining React with mobx.
Exports the observer
decorator and some development utilities.
For documentation, see the mobx project.
This package supports both React and React-Native.
Installation
npm install mobx-react --save
Or CDN: https://unpkg.com/mobx-react (namespace: mobxReact
)
import {observer} from 'mobx-react';
// - or -
import {observer} from 'mobx-react/native';
// - or, for custom renderers without DOM: -
import {observer} from 'mobx-react/custom';
This package provides the bindings for MobX and React. See the official documentation for how to get started.
Boilerplate projects that use mobx-react
- Minimal MobX, React, ES6, JSX, Hot reloading: MobX-React-Boilerplate
- TodoMVC MobX, React, ES6, JSX, Hot reloading: MobX-React-TodoMVC
- Minimal MobX, React, Typescript, TSX: MobX-React-Typescript-Boilerplate
- Minimal MobX, React, ES6(babel), JSPM with hot reloading modules: jspm-react
- React-Native Counter: Mobx-React-Native-Counter
API documentation
observer(componentClass)
Function (and decorator) that converts a React component definition, React component class or stand-alone render function into a reactive component. See the mobx documentation for more details.
import {observer} from "mobx-react";
// ---- ES5 syntax ----
const TodoView = observer(React.createClass({
displayName: "TodoView",
render() {
return <div>{this.props.todo.title}</div>
}
}));
// ---- ES6 syntax ----
const TodoView = observer(class TodoView extends React.Component {
render() {
return <div>{this.props.todo.title}</div>
}
})
// ---- ESNext syntax with decorators ----
@observer class TodoView extends React.Component {
render() {
return <div>{this.props.todo.title}</div>
}
}
// ---- or just use a stateless component function: ----
const TodoView = observer(({todo}) => <div>{todo.title}</div>)
Observer
This feature is still experimental and might change in the next minor release, or be deprecated
Observer
is a React component, which applies observer
to an unanymous region in your component.
It takes as children a single, argumentless function which should return exactly one React component.
The rendering in the function will be tracked and automatically be re-rendered when needed.
This can come in handy when needing to pass render function to external components (for example the React Native listview), or if you
dislike the observer
decorator / function.
Example:
class App extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
{this.props.person.name}
<Observer>
{() => <div>{this.props.person.name}</div>}
</Observer>
</div>
)
}
}
const person = observable({ name: "John" })
React.render(<App person={person} />, document.body)
person.name = "Mike" // will cause the Observer region to re-render
useStaticRendering
Server Side Rendering with When using server side rendering, normal lifecycle hooks of React components are not fired, as the components are rendered only once.
Since components are never unmounted, observer
components would in this case leak memory when being rendered server side.
To avoid leaking memory, call useStaticRendering(true)
when using server side rendering. This makes sure the component won't try to react to any future data changes.
observer
?
Which components should be marked with The simple rule of thumb is: all components that render observable data. If you don't want to mark a component as observer, for example to reduce the dependencies of a generic component package, make sure you only pass it plain data.
Enabling decorators (optional)
Decorators are currently a stage-2 ESNext feature. How to enable them is documented here.
Should I still use smart and dumb components?
See this thread.
TL;DR: the conceptual distinction makes a lot of sense when using MobX as well, but use observer
on all components.
shouldComponentUpdate
About It is possible to set a custom shouldComponentUpdate
, but in general this should be avoid as MobX will by default provide a highly optimized shouldComponentUpdate
implementation, based on PureRenderMixin
.
If a custom shouldComponentUpdate
is provided, it is consulted when the props changes (because the parent passes new props) or the state changes (as a result of calling setState
),
but if an observable used by the rendering is changed, the component will be re-rendered and shouldComponent
is not consulted.
Since version 4, mobx-react
will no longer trigger a re-rendering for non-observable objects that have been deeply changed.
componentWillReact
(lifecycle hook)
React components usually render on a fresh stack, so that makes it often hard to figure out what caused a component to re-render.
When using mobx-react
you can define a new life cycle hook, componentWillReact
(pun intended) that will be triggered when a component will be scheduled to re-rendered because
data it observes has changed. This makes it easy to trace renders back to the action that caused the rendering.
import {observer} from "mobx-react";
@observer class TodoView extends React.Component {
componentWillReact() {
console.log("I will re-render, since the todo has changed!");
}
render() {
return <div>{this.props.todo.title}</div>
}
}
componentWillReact
doesn't take argumentscomponentWillReact
won't fire before the initial render (usecomponentWillMount
instead)
PropTypes
MobX-react provides the following additional PropTypes
which can be used to validate against MobX structures:
observableArray
observableArrayOf(React.PropTypes.number)
observableMap
observableObject
arrayOrObservableArray
arrayOrObservableArrayOf(React.PropTypes.number)
objectOrObservableObject
Use import { PropTypes } from "mobx-react"
to import them, then use for example PropTypes.observableArray
Provider
and inject
Provider
is a component that can pass stores (or other stuff) using React's context mechanism to child components.
This is useful if you have things that you don't want to pass through multiple layers of components explicitly.
inject
can be used to pick up those stores. It is a higher order component that takes a list of strings and makes those stores available to the wrapped component.
Example (based on the official context docs):
@inject("color") @observer
class Button extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<button style={{background: this.props.color}}>
{this.props.children}
</button>
);
}
}
class Message extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
{this.props.text} <Button>Delete</Button>
</div>
);
}
}
class MessageList extends React.Component {
render() {
const children = this.props.messages.map((message) =>
<Message text={message.text} />
);
return <Provider color="red">
<div>
{children}
</div>
</Provider>;
}
}
Notes:
- If a component asks for a store and receives a store via a property with the same name, the property takes precedence. Use this to your advantage when testing!
- Values provided through
Provider
should be final, to avoid issues like mentioned in React #2517 and React #3973, where optimizations might stop the propagation of new context. Instead, make sure that if you put things incontext
that might change over time, that they are@observable
or provide some other means to listen to changes, like callbacks. However, if your stores will change over time, like an observable value of another store, mobx will warn you. To suppress that warning explicitly, you can usesuppressChangedStoreWarning={true}
as a prop on your own risk. - When using both
@inject
and@observer
, make sure to apply them in the correct order:observer
should be the inner decorator,inject
the outer. There might be additional decorators in between. - The original component wrapped by
inject
is available as thewrappedComponent
property of created the higher order component. - For mounted component instances, the wrapped component instance is available through the
wrappedInstance
property.
Inject as function
The above example in ES5 would start like:
var Button = inject("color")(observer(React.createClass({
/* ... etc ... */
})))
A functional stateless component would look like:
var Button = inject("color")(observer(({ color }) => {
/* ... etc ... */
}))
Customizing inject
Instead of passing a list of store names, it is also possible to create a custom mapper function and pass it to inject. The mapper function receives all stores as argument, the properties with which the components are invoked and the context, and should produce a new set of properties, that are mapped into the original:
mapperFunction: (allStores, props, context) => additionalProps
Since version 4.0 the mapperFunction
itself is tracked as well, so it is possible to do things like:
const NameDisplayer = ({ name }) => <h1>{name}</h1>
const UserNameDisplayer = inject(
stores => ({
name: stores.userStore.name
})
)(NameDisplayer)
const user = mobx.observable({
name: "Noa"
})
const App = () => (
<Provider userStore={user}>
<UserNameDisplayer />
</Provider>
)
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.body)
N.B. note that in this specific case neither NameDisplayer
or UserNameDisplayer
doesn't need to be decorated with observer
, since the observable dereferencing is done in the mapper function
propTypes
and defaultProps
and other static properties in combination with inject
Using Inject wraps a new component around the component you pass into it. This means that assigning a static property to the resulting component, will be applied to the HoC, and not to the original component. So if you take the following example:
const UserName = inject("userStore", ({ userStore, bold }) => someRendering())
UserName.propTypes = {
bold: PropTypes.boolean.isRequired,
userStore: PropTypes.object.isRequired // will always fail
}
The above propTypes are incorrect, bold
needs to be provided by the caller of the UserName
component and is checked by React.
However, userStore
does not need to be required! Although it is required for the original stateless function component, it is not
required for the resulting inject component. After all, the whole point of that component is to provide that userStore
itself.
So if you want to make assertions on the data that is being injected (either stores or data resulting from a mapper function), the propTypes
should be defined on the wrapped component. Which is available through the static property wrappedComponent
on the inject component:
const UserName = inject("userStore", ({ userStore, bold }) => someRendering())
UserName.propTypes = {
bold: PropTypes.boolean.isRequired // could be defined either here ...
}
UserName.wrappedComponent.propTypes = {
// ... or here
userStore: PropTypes.object.isRequired // correct
}
The same principle applies to defaultProps
and other static React properties.
Note that it is not allowed to redefine contextTypes
on inject
components (but is possible to define it on wrappedComponent
)
Finally, mobx-react will automatically move non React related static properties from wrappedComponent to the inject component so that all static fields are
actually available to the outside world without needing .wrappedComponent
.
Strongly typing inject
inject
also accepts a function ((allStores, nextProps, nextContext) => additionalProps
) that can be used to pick all the desired stores from the available stores like this.
The additionalProps
will be merged into the original nextProps
before being provided to the next component.
import {IUserStore} from "myStore"
@inject((allStores) => ({
userStore: allStores.userStore as IUserStore
}))
class MyComponent extends React.Component<{ userStore?: IUserStore; otherProp: number }, {}> {
/* etc */
}
Make sure to mark userStore
as optional property. It should not (necessarily) be passed in by parent components after all!
Testing store injection
It is allowed to pass any declared stored in directly as property as well. This makes it easy to set up individual component tests without a provider.
So if you have in your app something like:
<Provider profile ={profile}>
<Person age={'30'} />
</Provider>
In your test you can easily test the Person
component by passing the necessary store as prop directly:
const profile = new Profile()
const mountedComponent = mount(
<Person age={'30'} profile={profile} />
)
Bear in mind that using shallow rendering won't provide any useful results when testing injected components; only the injector will be rendered.
To test with shallow rendering, instantiate the .wrappedComponent instead:
: shallow(<Person.wrappedComponent />)
FAQ
Should I use observer
for each component?
You should use observer
on every component that displays observable data.
Even the small ones. observer
allows components to render independently from their parent and in general this means that
the more you use observer
, the better the performance become.
The overhead of observer
itself is neglectable.
See also Do child components need @observer
?
I see React warnings about forceUpdate
/ setState
from React
The following warning will appear if you trigger a re-rendering between instantiating and rendering a component:
Warning: forceUpdate(...): Cannot update during an existing state transition (such as within `render`). Render methods should be a pure function of props and state.`
-- or --
Warning: setState(...): Cannot update during an existing state transition (such as within `render` or another component's constructor). Render methods should be a pure function of props and state; constructor side-effects are an anti-pattern, but can be moved to `componentWillMount`.
Usually this means that (another) component is trying to modify observables used by this components in their constructor
or getInitialState
methods.
This violates the React Lifecycle, componentWillMount
should be used instead if state needs to be modified before mounting.
Internal DevTools Api
trackComponents()
Enables the tracking from components. Each rendered reactive component will be added to the componentByNodeRegistery
and its renderings will be reported through the renderReporter
event emitter.
renderReporter
Event emitter that reports render timings and component destructions. Only available after invoking trackComponents()
.
New listeners can be added through renderReporter.on(function(data) { /* */ })
.
Data will have one of the following formats:
{
event: 'render',
renderTime: /* time spend in the .render function of a component, in ms. */,
totalTime: /* time between starting a .render and flushing the changes to the DOM, in ms. */,
component: /* component instance */,
node: /* DOM node */
}
{
event: 'destroy',
component: /* component instance */,
node: /* DOM Node */
}
componentByNodeRegistery
WeakMap. Its get
function returns the associated reactive component of the given node. The node needs to be precisely the root node of the component.
This map is only available after invoking trackComponents
.