What is the purpose of the component property in CSF?

This is just a question, not a bug report; I’ve scoured the docs looking for an answer but haven’t found any. The docs state that a CSF module should default-export a metadata object like

export default {
  title: 'Path|To/MyComponent',
  component: MyComponent,
  decorators: [ ... ],
  parameters: { ... }
}

What is the purpose of the component property? I’ve seen elsewhere that it is omitted, and I can’t tell what value it adds.

[shilman]

Right now, it’s only used in addon-docs. DocsPage uses it to automatically extract the props table & description of the component. However, it will get a lot more use in the future.

For example, stories for many non-react frameworks currently look like this:

export const basic = () => ({
  component: Blah
  template: '<blah>blah</blah>'
})
export const disabled = () => ({
  component: Blah
  template: '<blah :disabled=true>disabled</blah>'
})

Other uses include addons that want to associate component-related statistics on top of the stories. For example, I recently prototyped a code coverage addon that relies on component.

[shilman]

Updated the docs per your suggestion @ekilah

Also see https://github.com/storybookjs/csf/pull/5 which will be incorporated into a broader Storybook TS upgrade soon