Exposing DOM Refs to Parent Components

In rare cases, you might want to have access to a child’s DOM node from a parent component. This is generally not recommended because it breaks component encapsulation, but it can occasionally be useful for triggering focus or measuring the size or position of a child DOM node.

While you could add a ref to the child component, this is not an ideal solution, as you would only get a component instance rather than a DOM node. Additionally, this wouldn’t work with function components.

If you use React 16.3 or higher, we recommend to use ref forwarding for these cases. Ref forwarding lets components opt into exposing any child component’s ref as their own. You can find a detailed example of how to expose a child’s DOM node to a parent component in the ref forwarding documentation.

If you use React 16.2 or lower, or if you need more flexibility than provided by ref forwarding, you can use this alternative approach and explicitly pass a ref as a differently named prop.

When possible, we advise against exposing DOM nodes, but it can be a useful escape hatch. Note that this approach requires you to add some code to the child component. If you have absolutely no control over the child component implementation, your last option is to use findDOMNode(), but it is discouraged and deprecated in StrictMode.