Documentation Issues with react-addons-shallow-compare Package

[zramaekers]

We were previously using the shallowEqual method from the react/lib implementation, which was used in the following way:

  shouldComponentUpdate(nextProps, nextState) {
    return !shallowEqual(this.props, nextProps) || !shallowEqual(this.state, nextState);
  }

When updating to 0.14, we migrated to using the npm package for 'react-addons-shallow-compare'.
We assumed shallowCompare worked the same way, but anything we passed to shallowCompare was returning true

  shouldComponentUpdate(nextProps, nextState) {
    return !shallowCompare(this.props, nextProps) || !shallowCompare(this.state, nextState);
  }

After doing some low level testing, even the following was returning true:

shallowCompare({value: true}, {value: false});

Using the Chrome dev tools I was able to discover the method signature that was expected:

I think we need to better document this method somewhere, either in the npm package page (https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-addons-shallow-compare) or on the addons page (https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/addons.html) to help out others wanting to make this transition.

[zpao]

Would you be interested in writing some documentation for the website? If so, let's not reference the previous existence of shallowEqual since it was never part of our public API.

[zramaekers]

For sure. Where would I start doing that?

[zpao]

Awesome!

The documentation and website all live in the repo: https://github.com/facebook/react/tree/master/docs with the bulk of the docs in https://github.com/facebook/react/tree/master/docs/docs. The 10.x pages are the addons docs so you'd want to make a new markdown file around there. There's a readme in the root of docs describing running the server (it's jekyll) so you can test the changes locally.

[scsper]

it looks like this issue should be closed :)

[zpao]

Thanks, yes it should. I'm following up now and fixing the link in the readme so npm links to the right thing.