React – the right way to pass form element state to sibling/parent elements?

So, if I’m understanding you correctly, your first solution is suggesting that you’re keeping state in your root component? I can’t speak for the creators of React, but generally, I find this to be a proper solution.

Maintaining state is one of the reasons (at least I think) that React was created. If you’ve ever implemented your own state pattern client side for dealing with a dynamic UI that has a lot of interdependent moving pieces, then you’ll love React, because it alleviates a lot of this state management pain.

By keeping state further up in the hierarchy, and updating it through eventing, your data flow is still pretty much unidirectional, you’re just responding to events in the Root component, you’re not really getting the data there via two way binding, you’re telling the Root component that “hey, something happened down here, check out the values” or you’re passing the state of some data in the child component up in order to update the state. You changed the state in C1, and you want C2 to be aware of it, so, by updating the state in the Root component and re-rendering, C2’s props are now in sync since the state was updated in the Root component and passed along.

class Example extends React.Component {
  constructor (props) {
    super(props)
    this.state = { data: 'test' }
  }
  render () {
    return (
      <div>
        <C1 onUpdate={this.onUpdate.bind(this)}/>
        <C2 data={this.state.data}/>
      </div>
    )
  }
  onUpdate (data) { this.setState({ data }) }
}

class C1 extends React.Component {
    render () {
      return (
        <div>
          <input type="text" ref="myInput"/>
          <input type="button" onClick={this.update.bind(this)} value="Update C2"/>
        </div>
      )
    }
    update () {
      this.props.onUpdate(this.refs.myInput.getDOMNode().value)
    }
})

class C2 extends React.Component {
    render () {
      return <div>{this.props.data}</div>
    }
})

ReactDOM.renderComponent(<Example/>, document.body)