browser-request is not compatible with react-native

[poernahi]

Production build in react-native fails because the browser-request library tries to call document.createElement to check for cross-domain request (for CORS).

In React Native, document is not defined and CORS is not relevant.

The browser-request library has not been updated since 2014, so upstream fix seems very unlikely.

I propose dependency update to https://www.npmjs.com/package/xmlhttp-request which is a fork of browser-request that fixed this problem.

[jryans]

Thanks for raising this issue! element-hq/element-web#7634 is related and raises some complexity to consider when moving to a different request library.

If xmlhttp-request solves those issues, then it seems like a reasonable candidate.

You may be able to workaround the problem for your own application by passing a different request function into the JS SDK:

matrix-js-sdk/src/matrix.js

Lines 122 to 130 in 5c8890c

	/**
	* The function used to perform HTTP requests. Only use this if you want to
	* use a different HTTP library, e.g. Angular's <code>$http</code>. This should
	* be set prior to calling {@link createClient}.
	* @param {requestFunction} r The request function to use.
	*/
	module.exports.request = function(r) {
	request = r;
	};

[bradjones1]

Exploring related questions - request is in maintenance mode and xmlhttp-request hasn't been touched in many years. I think this could perhaps be closed in favor of #801 (comment)