Rename the `country` prop to `defaultCountry`?

I have an idea. 😃 I wonder if renaming the country prop to defaultCountry would make it clearer how the prop is used and prevent people from thinking they can directly control the selected country via the country prop.

It just occurred to me that the country portion of this component (in contrast to the phone value) behaves basically like an uncontrolled component. And since a default prefix is conventionally used for uncontrolled components, this might make its behavior more self-documenting.

Read, for example, https://reactjs.org/docs/uncontrolled-components.html#default-values:

With an uncontrolled component, you often want React to specify the initial value, but leave subsequent updates uncontrolled. To handle this case, you can specify a defaultValue attribute instead of value.

Then maybe you wouldn’t have to keep explaining to people (see #165, #138) how the supplied country is only used (as a default value) if the internal country state is not already set/initialized based on the supplied phone number (which you can think of as overriding the default)…

[TylerRick]

Thanks, @catamphetamine. I’m glad you at least appreciate the carefully constructed issues I submit, even if you can’t or won’t implement all the changes I suggest.

Personally I think you should make the change. But that’s easy for me to say. 😃

I understand it would be hard to introduce such a change after you have many users already using the current API. Still, there are ways to do so, if you ever change your mind. (Helpful deprecation warnings in current minor releases (2.4), and wait until you increment the major version number (3.0) to introduce the breaking change, changing the deprecation warning into a helpful error message.)

Still, it’s a long name,

With respect to you, it is not. It is only 2 letters longer than defaultValue would be. display​Initial​Value​As​Local​Number, on the other hand, is a long name, but it’s okay, because it’s clear (whereas a shorter name for the same prop would likely be ambiguous). Clarity is more important than short.

But I agree that some people might assume they could change it

Exactly. It would be a logical conclusion to arrive it. (See #165, #138)

Unless a prop name has a default prefix or contain the word “initial”, one should in general be able to safely assume that changing that prop gives you rather direct control over something.

and the component could even handle such change but I didn’t add such functionality intentionally to keep things simple.

I understand.

[catamphetamine]

Released version 3.x that renamed country to defaultCountry, as you suggested.