How can I reset a react component including all transitively reachable state?

Question

I occasionally have react components that are conceptually stateful which I want to reset. The ideal behavior would be equivalent to removing the old component and readding a new, pristine component.

React provides a method setState which allows setting the components own explicit state, but that excludes implicit state such as browser focus and form state, and it also excludes the state of its children. Catching all that indirect state can be a tricky task, and I'd prefer to solve it rigorously and completely rather that playing whack-a-mole with every new bit of surprising state.

Is there an API or pattern to do this?

Edit: I made a trivial example demonstrating the this.replaceState(this.getInitialState()) approach and contrasting it with the this.setState(this.getInitialState()) approach: jsfiddle - replaceState is more robust.

Answer 1

To ensure that the implicit browser state you mention and state of children is reset, you can add a key attribute to the root-level component returned by render; when it changes, that component will be thrown away and created from scratch.

render: function() {     // ...     return <div key={uniqueId}>         {children}     </div>; } 

There's no shortcut to reset the individual component's local state.