Provide a simple moment-less API

In one of my projects I’m passing dates to server API calls as strings, and I also receive dates back as strings which are stored in redux state. In the spirit of keeping my state clean I keep the strings as the source of truth rather than moment objects; this also makes it possible to pre-generate my state on the server, which would get ugly if it contained moment objects. This led me to write a wrapper datepicker component that would simply translate between strings and moment objects so that they can be passed as props to the datepicker. This got me thinking that maybe we should provide a way of dealing with strings natively in this component. I can think of a couple approaches here:

1. Provide wrapper component in datepicker – Only functionality would be to wrap/unwrap moment objects and pass them to the real datepicker component. Probably the easiest to maintain, cleanest code-wise; but calling something SimpleDatePicker seems a little silly
2. Provide a simple prop – When set all props (selected, minDate, etc, the value passed to onChange) will be strings formatted according to dateFormat. A little dirtier code-wise; adding a prop to control how other props are handled seems kind of anti-react to me
3. Automatically determine behavior – Determine the intended behavior by what is passed into selected: if a string, everything is a string, and if a moment, everything is a moment. By far the simplest API; dirtier code-wise, and I’m not sure how it should behave when selected is null

What does everyone think?

[greaber]

IMO, since a date picker just lets you choose a year, month, and day, its state should just be three JavaScript numbers. The component is just a piece of UI and shouldn’t be prescriptive about your data model. It shouldn’t require a heavy dependency like moment.js or even use JavaScript dates. You can keep whatever you want in Redux – triples of numbers, JavaScript dates, moment dates, or even strings. Also, instead of adding timezone awareness as suggested in #507 and #498, it could just allow the user to explicitly pass a value for “today” (which would also be a triple of numbers).

[martijnrusschen]

1. Feels silly but keeps it simple
2. Sounds nice, but feels wrong.
3. This is probably the best UX, but I don’t think this is really stable and reliable in the future.

This comment isn’t really helping, but wanted to share my thoughts.