How to Export Instance Methods from React Function Components
“You can have a little imperative React, as a treat.”
When building modern applications with React, Function Components and Hooks are the de facto way to do it. Hooks make your code more declarative and easier to reason about (usually).
However, with all great hammers, you run the risk of everything looking like a nail. Occasionally, some more object-oriented solutions might be the right tool for the job. For example, what if you had a child component that contained a function that needed to be called from the parent? You might want an instance method, but we don’t use Classes anymore!
Fear not – you don’t have to abandon Hooks to be able to call methods on child components. In this post, I’ll show you how – using forwardRef and useImperativeHandle.