React fails to unmount component from within event handler

[slorber]

Hi,

When trying to unmount my whole app, I got some error.

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'firstChild' of undefined
ReactMount.js:606ReactMount.findComponentRoot
ReactMount.js:606ReactMount.findReactNodeByID ReactMount.js:552getNode
ReactMount.js:128executeDispatch EventPluginUtils.js:109SimpleEventPlugin.executeDispatch
SimpleEventPlugin.js:305forEachEventDispatch EventPluginUtils.js:95executeDispatchesInOrder
EventPluginUtils.js:119executeDispatchesAndRelease EventPluginHub.js:46forEachAccumulated
forEachAccumulated.js:25EventPluginHub.processEventQueue
EventPluginHub.js:251runEventQueueInBatch
ReactEventEmitterMixin.js:18ReactEventEmitterMixin.handleTopLevel
ReactEventEmitterMixin.js:44handleTopLevelImpl ReactEventListener.js:80Mixin.perform
Transaction.js:134ReactDefaultBatchingStrategy.batchedUpdates
ReactDefaultBatchingStrategy.js:66batchedUpdates
ReactUpdates.js:109ReactEventListener.dispatchEvent ReactEventListener.js:175

I think it's not a big deal.

According to what I see with the debugger, it seems to be because a SyntheticMouseEvent is trying to get dispatched. And I guess the target has just been unmounted...

Note that my use case looks like this:

var Hello = React.createClass({
    render: function() {
        return <div onClick={unmount}>Hello {this.props.name}</div>;
    }
});

When using an unmount synchronous implementation, I get this error.
When adding a setTimeout 0 in the unmount code, I got no error.

I could not reproduce this in a jsfiddle, but I guess it's probably because I don't really know how batching work in React.

[slorber]

You can find more informations on my usecase here:

#3038

Basically on user language change I want to add the new language to the React context, and force re-render of the whole thing.

This is not Flux code but I guess you'll understand what it does:

context.addEventListener(function(event) {
    if ( event.name === AppEvents.Names.USER_PREFERRED_LANGUAGE_SELECTED ) {
        setTimeout(function() {
            var newLanguage = event.data.language;
            var newReactContext = buildReactContext(newLanguage);
            context.unmount();
            context.setReactContext(newReactContext);
            context.renderCurrentAtomState();
        },0);
    }
});

As you can see it works for me with a setTimeout, I get an error only when unmounting synchronously.
(This really happens during the unmount, if I remove the other calls, I still get the error)

[syranide]

Unmounting during a React event is not currently supported AFAIK.

[jimfb]

Unmounting as the result of a event sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do; I think we should try to support this.

@slorber can you create a simple jsfiddle that demonstrates the issue?

[slorber]

@jimfb Yes I've successfully reproduced the case here: http://jsfiddle.net/wevohwfp/

My first attempt was not working because I did not try to add another event listener to the parent

[jimfb]

Awesome, thanks!

Issue is related to mutating nodes synchronously within an event loop. We may want to make unmount take effect at the end of the event loop. I think this demonstrates the more general problem of how to handle these top-level functions from within an event loop.

[jasonslyvia]

plus one here, it's reasonable behaviour to unmount a component as the result of a React event.

[blairanderson]

I just ran into this.

for anyone else coming here, stopPropagation on the event does not work either.

I ended up building a wrapper component to handle, basically acting as a mini router for the user-flow.

[bramschulting]

We encountered this problem as well, but we've found a dirty work-around. If you wrap React.unmountComponentAtNode(target) in a setTimeout, this will work.

We use this in a portal mixin, which renders a React component in a different DOM element. This raised another problem when rendering a new component directly after unmounting the first one. In that case, the second component won't show up. We fixed this by storing a unique key in the component state and the DOM element, and only calling unmountComponentAtNode if these keys are the same.

setTimeout(()=> {
  if (this.state.portalKey === this._target._portalKey) {
    React.unmountComponentAtNode(this._target);
  }
});

This works for now, but we'd love a less dirty, more native solution

[lencioni]

Is this perhaps a duplicate of #2605?