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React Deep Dive: From Beginner to Advanced

Ref Forwarding

Explore how to utilize React's ref forwarding pattern to pass references through components to DOM elements or child components. Understand its use cases with functional components and how to correctly manage refs when working with higher-order components for reusable and unified UI elements.

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Ref forwarding via React.forwardRef()

Ref forwardingReferences to a component or a DOM element enables passing a reference through a component to a child component. This will not be necessary in most cases, but it can become of interest if you are creating reusable component libraries.

A ref is forwarded via React.forwardRef() and is passed a function as a parameter during this process. The ref passes props, as well as the ref itself, to the forwardRef function.

This sounds incredibly cumbersome, so let us first look at an example.

Note: For the SPA widgets ...