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The React documentation website
https://react.dev/
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[Suggestion]: Documentation for `useRef` should tell us how to deal with multiple refs on a single element #7251

Open Svish opened 1 month ago

Svish commented 1 month ago

Summary

Sometimes you need to add more than one ref to a single element. For example:

This is an issue that is not even mentioned on the current documentation of useRef. I've been using gregberge/react-merge-refs to deal with this, but after I added the recommended eslint-plugin-react-compiler, this method now generates a warning:

Ref values (the current property) may not be accessed during render.

If you're not allowed to access ref values during render to merge them, then how are you supposed to attach multiple refs to a single element now?

The documentation needs to tell us how to do this properly, and in a way that doesn't break the compiler or generate warnings in your eslint plugins.

Page

https://react.dev/reference/react/useRef

Details

Example component needing this:

export default forwardRef(
  function BaseCheckbox(
    { label, indeterminate = false, onChange, onCheckedChange, ...props },
    ref
  ) {
    const inputId = useId();
    const inputRef = useRef(null);

    useLayoutEffect(() => {
      if (inputRef.current)
        inputRef.current.indeterminate = indeterminate;
    }, [indeterminate]);

    return (
      <div className="checkbox">
        <input
          type="checkbox"
          id={inputId}
          /**
           * Here we have two refs we need to attach to this input, but there's no
           * documented way to do that and the undocumented way is not allowed
           * according to the new rules from `eslint-plugin-react-compiler`.
           */ 
          ref={mergeRefs(inputRef, ref)}
          onChange={(e) => {
            onChange?.(e);
            onCheckedChange?.(e.currentTarget.checked);
          }}
          aria-checked={
            indeterminate ? 'mixed' : props.checked ? 'true' : 'false'
          }
          {...props}
        />
        <label htmlFor={inputId}>
          {label}
        </label>
      </div>
    );
  }
);
ArshadAriff commented 1 month ago

/assign