Initial values

Thank you for this very handy project! I have just made a PR to add it to Recharts (http://recharts.org), but there is a minor thing that makes them sort of incompatible.

React-container-dimensions is always sending its initial state (width and height set to zero) to the children components on the first render, and therefore Recharts prints multiple warns saying that it can’t render the charts in these conditions.

Can we send others values, other than zeros, to the children? What about having a third parameter hasInitiated, or send null as first values?

Link to the PR: recharts/recharts#105

[zvictor]

Sorry, I couldn’t understand what you mean by since this is doable in the callback. Could you clarify it?

I think it is wrong to send { width: 0, height: 0 } in the first render because it is just conceptually wrong since the container does not have these dimensions. My understanding is that we should not be sending wrong data just because we don’t have the actual data.

So, to be able to get the real data (the container size), we need to render something in first place. Rendering null and then executing ReactDOM.findDOMNode(this).parentNode would fail. But we can’t render the children because we don’t have the dimensions yet. It is a circular dependency!

Therefore, we have three options:

1. Render a placeholder element, get the container size, and only then render the actual children.
2. Use values other than zero to denote that the values have not being initiated yet. This way, children would be able to know that when { width: null, height: null } it should wait for the next render.
3. As mentioned before, having an attribute hasInitiated that we pass to the children so it is then aware that we don’t have the actual dimensions yet and we give the children the responsibility of dealing with it.

I am sending now a PR for the approach 1.

[zvictor]

thank you!