Infinite loop when using React context feature

[ffxsam]

I've run into an infinite loop situation where basically what's happening is this:

I have a Parent component that contains two functions, showSpinner and hideSpinner, which essentially set the Parent state to spinnerVisible: true and spinnerVisible: false, respectively.

I'm using context to pass these functions down wherever they're needed:

Parent.jsx

Parent = React.createClass({
  childContextTypes: {
      spinnerVisible: React.PropTypes.bool,
      spinnerMessage: React.PropTypes.string,
      showSpinner: React.PropTypes.func,
      hideSpinner: React.PropTypes.func
  },

  getChildContext() {
        spinnerVisible: this.state.spinnerVisible,
        spinnerMessage: this.state.spinnerMessage,
        showSpinner: this.showSpinner,
        hideSpinner: this.hideSpinner
  }

  [...]

And then in a child template (we'll call Child for simplicity's sake):

  getMeteorData() {
    let handle = Meteor.subscribe('tracks');

    if (!handle.ready()) {
      this.context.showSpinner(TAPi18n.__('loadingTracks'), true);
    } else {
      this.context.hideSpinner();
      console.log('we are ready');
    }

    return {
      ready: handle.ready(),
      tracks: Tracks.find({}, {sort: {createdAt: -1}}).fetch()
    }
  },

What happens is, I get the spinner for a couple seconds while the subscription is waiting for data (I have an artificial 5-second sleep in the publication). Once it's ready, I get an infinite amount of "we are ready" messages being dumped.

The interesting thing is, if I remove this.context.hideSpinner(), I get the message just once. So apparently, when hideSpinner() is setting the Parent's state to spinnerVisible: false, it's triggering the getMeteorData method over and over. I'm guessing this might be a bug involving React's context feature, but I could be wrong.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

[stubailo]

Does hideSpinner do anything if the spinner is already hidden? AFAIK if the state is the same before and after nothing should re-run.

[ffxsam]

The code is changed now since I found a workaround. But if I recall, hideSpinner was just doing this.setState({spinnerVisible: false}).

[ffxsam]

I'm gonna close this issue. Apparently context is a bit of a React hack, that might wind up going away anyway..