[Discussion] How to extend existing Core Components in React-Native?

So, I have written a library, react-native-webview-bridge, for WebView to handle message passing between React-Native and Javascript in WebView. It is based on WebViewJavascriptBridge.

So since there is no way to extend WebView.ios.js, I ended up copying the source code and renamed and modified it, which is not ideal. What I want is a way to extend a React-Native’s Core Components.

I’m looking for some suggestions to guide me through this. How would you guys extend the Core Component? Is it actually possible to extend any React’s implementation?

Just to be clear, I am talking about the Javascript portion of React-Native’s Components not the objective-c part.

[wilsonpage]

@alinz do you have an example of how this could translate for Android?

[brentvatne]

Currently there are a couple of ways to do this, that I know of:

• You can wrap it in another component that layers on the functionality
• You can subclass it if you must, eg:

class SuperText extends Text {

  render() {
    return (
      <View>
        <Text style={{color: 'pink', textAlign: 'center'}}>*******************</Text>
        {super.render()}
        <Text style={{color: 'purple', textAlign: 'center'}}>:) :) :) :) :)</Text>
      </View>
    )
  }

}