React Native Compatibility

[jacobdfriedmann]

Was playing with react native recently and attempted to use fluxthis because I like it. There are only a couple things (one important one) that would need to be changed in order to make it compatible. I even think the APIActionCreators will work because react-native polyfills xhr. However, ActionCreator pulls in react/lib/ReactPropTypes for payloadType validation. This obviously won't work in a react native project which would need to require something like require('react-native').PropTypes instead.

Not sure if there is a good way (or a convention) to have this dual peer dependency on react OR react-native, but it seems like there should be an easy way to achieve this. Just thought I'd open it up to conversation.

[jhorwit2]

I think the only solution would be to publish react-native specific versions along with our normal releases.

[AlanFoster]

Slightly crazy suggestion -

Could we make use of peer dependencies here?

ie, create a new npm module fluxthis-prop-types for wrapping PropTypes, release two specific branch versions for react-native and react-dom, then specify fluxthis-prop-types as a peer dependency, defaulting to the react-dom branch version. If a developer wants to change this to use react-native proptypes, they will specify in their package.json that they want the react-native wrapper branch instead

[jmrog]

Looking quickly through the source, I think @jacobdfriedmann is right that the dependency on react/lib/ReactPropTypes is the main issue. FluxThis only uses that for payload validation, I think (and only in dev environments), so I think it's really worth considering making that an optional dependency. It might even be as simple as putting the relevant require in a try-catch block (maybe first trying to require from react, then trying to require from react-native, and then giving up), making the validation parts in ActionCreator conditional on the presence of PropTypes, and possibly issuing a warning message to the user if no supplier of PropTypes is found.

[jmrog]

I finally got a chance do some playing around with this tonight. @jacobdfriedmann, do you recall what the original problem was when you created this issue? I ask because I was actually able to get FluxThis working with React Native without any real tinkering at all. Things I tested: APIActionCreator with a request to a NodeJS endpoint that I quickly whipped up, plain old ActionCreator, and ImmutableStore. They all essentially "just worked" (even the validation of payloadTypes; see the second screenshot below).

One possible caveat is that I required the pre-built version of FluxThis; not sure how things would go with the uncompiled version.

EDIT to add: the validation failure in the second screenshot is right, even though the payloadType is string in the first screenshot; I temporarily changed it to number to check that it would fail.

[jacobdfriedmann]

You're right...this isn't a problem if you use the prebuilt version, which comes packaged with the PropTypes module. I was requiring the source files. I guess there is no real need for me to do that. I'll close this.

[jmrog]

This is also worth noting. It sounds like you might be able to require the source files without issue very soon. facebook/react-native#2985