Use React 16's forwardRef for most/all components

[seansfkelley]

reactstrap is a perfect use-case for React 16's new forwardRef API. Since most components in this library have predictable and well-defined DOM they produce, it would be very useful to have them forward their refs along to the underlying elements so consumers like myself don't have to wrap access in ReactDOM.findDOMNode when we want to e.g. implement a scroll-related feature.

[TheSharpieOne]

I'm all for this, but it will be a breaking change since it will change the require version of react needed as a peerDep.

[illiteratewriter]

If adding refs is all that is needed, we can do that like how we did https://github.com/reactstrap/reactstrap/issues/1054, so that we don't have to change react version, right? So wouldn't it be better to do it like that so we don't have to bumb the version up?

[seansfkelley]

True. You could put innerRef on everything, and use this issue as a tracking issue for the eventual deprecation and replacement with forwardRef as noted in #1054 (comment).

[seansfkelley]

@TheSharpieOne when would you accept a PR for this breaking change? I keep coming up against this cause I want to attach refs to things that often turn out to be stateless components. I'd be open to making a PR to apply the change as well. We might be able to keep innerRef around as a deprecated alias to preserve API-compatibility even as the minimum React version is raised.

It's a shame that 16.3 was introduced not 6 days after #916 dropped support for versions below 16. :(

[TheSharpieOne]

@seansfkelley there is a v7 branch, make PRs with breaking changes to that branch, eventually it will be merged and released.

[seansfkelley]

@TheSharpieOne looks like I just missed the chance to get into v7, but I just opened #1356 for the nest release.

[iamandrewluca]

When you start using forwardRef in a component library, you should treat it as a breaking change and release a new major version of your library. This is because your library likely has an observably different behavior (such as what refs get assigned to, and what types are exported), and this can break apps and other libraries that depend on the old behavior.
https://reactjs.org/docs/forwarding-refs.html#note-for-component-library-maintainers

[TheSharpieOne]

Yes, it would be nice to get forwardRef into the next major release. This missed v7 as well as v8

[iamandrewluca]

@TheSharpieOne Now I'm working on reactjs/react-transition-group#559 to migrate from deprecated findDOMNode then I think I'll create a new PR from #1356, to migrate to forward ref, and use new react-transition-group api, so we can finally use React.StrictMode in our app.

[darron1217]

Any updates on this issue?
It is really needed.