Hacker News Reader

Comment by thatswrong0 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I'm not a fan at all of react-router because it's too dependent on React. For redirecting, for example, they recommend you render a <Redirect> component. Which is just bananas to me.

View on HN

It's not really bananas when you actually start to think of everything 'as components', and consider that 'render' can neatly, declaratively describe behaviour, not just the DOM.

could you recommend any articles/tutorials that describe this approach some more?

This Ryan Florence talk is a great talk that touches on this topic, especially in some of the more creative examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp-NOggyz54

thanks!

'render' should render, because that's what the function name says. If you're using it for behavior then you're not using it for the intended purpose.

Now that hooks exist, this should definitely be the case. Before, HoCs / components with render prop functions were actually useful for doing some additional not-directly-render related work.

You can now use hooks for some things you might previously want a component for, e.g. useFetch instead of <Fetch />, but don't agree "this should definitely be the case". Dogma is never good.

Strongly disagree, and 'because the function is called that' is a very poor reason.

You're not using React to its full potential if you think like this.

That _is_ how I think about components, but it's still bananas. Render does not neatly describe this behavior because it necessitates setting unnecessary state. That's gross.

Usually when I need to trigger a redirect, I'm in some business-level function. So to redirect this way, I would need to set some state in my store, re-render, then hit the conditional, which would redirect, probably unset that state, and then probably trigger some additional business logic.

When really all I want to do is in the business function, directly trigger the redirect and maybe some other logic without any indirection. redux-react-router exists, but it's API is still obtuse compared to something like redux-first-router.

> When really all I want to do is in the business function, directly trigger the redirect and maybe some other logic without any indirection.

Heh, didn't see this comment before I left a novel up the tree. Seems we have similar ideas about state management.

I think the default RR API is straight React, and that is by design.

Since you are talking about using Redux, you most definitely can dispatch push actions with libs like connected-react-router or just use the history API directly (for things like replacing state instead of pushing). Most of the redirects I write are inside business logic and I don't like mixing <Redirect /> in there, too.

Then you can use `useHistory` (or `withRouter` if you're not hooks-ready).

I somewhat agree that the <Redirect /> component is not actually that useful, it's only useful in very simple cases like "based on one route plus conditional redirect to another", e.g.:

    <Route path="/">
      {usersPreviousShoppingGender === "women" ? (
        <Redirect to="/women" />
      ) : (
        ...
      )}
      ...
    </Route>
    <Route path="/women">

The alternative would be to write a side effect inside your `render()` function, which is illegal -- it breaks the new Concurrent mode rendering, which can call render() speculatively.

I mean, I see why it's intuitively unappealing to you, but there are perfectly good reasons for the design.

There are "perfectly good reasons" in the sense that if you artificially limit yourself to using the React component tree to manage routes, yes it makes sense how they arrived at this solution. But after dealing with it for a while, it's just so obviously not the correct approach, and it's crazy to me that it's the defacto router. Cargo culting at its finest. The router could exist outside of or at a higher level than the component tree.

It's the defacto router because it has gone through many iterations, has lots of users, is easy to bring into a React app, and doesn't fight w/ React, it works with it. Plus there are a variety of approaches to declaring routes. [0]

I'm not sure I see how obvious it is that a <Redirect/> is wrong. But that's fine, I take your point that it's not particularly intuitive.

I'm of the opinion that routing, in general, is a function of application state - and I like to manage my application state with Redux - so I will often also mix in connected-react-router [1]. This lets you do navigation w/ an imperative API [2].

[0] https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/tree/master/pa...

[1] https://github.com/supasate/connected-react-router

[2] https://github.com/supasate/connected-react-router/blob/mast...

The alternative would be to write a side effect inside your `render()` function, which is illegal

That's one alternative. Another is not to try implementing behaviour that has nothing to do with rendering using a rendering library in the first place.

A horrible amount of accidental complexity has been created in the React ecosystem when people have tried to use it like a full framework. If all you have is a hammer, maybe it's time to consider using other tools as well.

It’s bananas to you that a library with the word react in the name would be dependent on react? It’s an add on you would literally never use unless you are building a react app

Reply on news.ycombinator.com