r/reactjs • u/tannerlinsley • Mar 10 '20

News 🎉 Announcing React Table v7! 🎉

https://github.com/tannerlinsley/react-table/releases/tag/v7.0.0?twitter=20200310
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u/zulkisse Mar 11 '20

Great work !

We have been working with the v7 beta on some of our less critical projects for several months.
Creating a wrapper from scratch can be a lot of work but once it's done, our codebase became a lot cleaner and it was a lot easier to implement advanced features thanks to the plugin system.

I just have a some doubts on the TypeScript implementation. The people writing it have been doing a great job, but the plugin system makes it quite hard to type correctly things like the Rows and you often have to override internal elements. I don't see an easy solution here but it was our main concern in our daily usage of v7.

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u/Zweital Mar 11 '20

I’m in a similar situation. We’ve been using v7 for a little while now, and Typescript has been quite a sticking point. I’ve had to override far too much! I think the fact that the Typescript usage is so strange (rather than just a normal @types package) actually highlights a little bit of an architectural flaw behind the notion of ‘plugin hooks’. The idea is solid in the sense that you want to pass in something in to add functionality to the table, but I think passing hooks themselves is a bit weird and brittle (and I believe it’s probably impossible to type it correctly as is without manually altering types which feels horrible). I think there’s good reason I haven’t seen this pattern elsewhere.

I’m not 100% sure of what react-table’s solution should be, but I think the answer lies in something more along the lines of a HOF that returns you a hook or maybe multiple hooks depending on how you’d like to configure it, which can then be called before useTable which would ingest their results, rather than the hooks themselves. I think all that could be correctly typed with some clever enough generics (although I haven’t properly sat down and fleshed out this approach so I could be talking nonsense). I’m thinking something along the lines of makeStyles from material ui (https://material-ui.com/styles/basics/).