How do I set state of sibling components easily in React?

Question

I have got the beginnings of a clickable list component that will serve to drive a select element. As you can see from the below, onClick of the ListItem, I'm passing the state of a child element (ListItem in this case) to the parents (SelectableList, and CustomSelect component). This is working fine. However, what I would also like to do is change the state of the sibling components (the other ListItems) so that I can toggle their selected states when one of the ListItems is clicked.

At the moment, I'm simply using document.querySelectorAll('ul.cs-select li) to grab the elements and change the class to selected when it doesn't match the index of the clicked ListItem. This works - to an extent. However, after a few clicks, the state of the component has not been updated by React (only by client side JS), and things start to break down. What I would like to do is change the this.state.isSelected of the sibling list items, and use this state to refresh the SelectableList component. Could anyone offer a better alternative to what I've written below?

var React = require('react');
var SelectBox = require('./select-box');

var ListItem = React.createClass({
    getInitialState: function() {
        return {
            isSelected: false
        };
    },

    toggleSelected: function () {
        if (this.state.isSelected == true) {
            this.setState({
                isSelected: false
            })
        } else {
            this.setState({
                isSelected: true
            })
        }
    },

    handleClick: function(listItem) {
        this.toggleSelected();
        this.props.onListItemChange(listItem.props.value);

        var unboundForEach = Array.prototype.forEach,
            forEach = Function.prototype.call.bind(unboundForEach);

        forEach(document.querySelectorAll('ul.cs-select li'), function (el) {

            // below is trying to 
            // make sure that when a user clicks on a list
            // item in the SelectableList, then all the *other*
            // list items get class="selected" removed.
            // this works for the first time that you move through the 
            // list clicking the other items, but then, on the second
            // pass through, starts to fail, requiring *two clicks* before the
            // list item is selected again.
            // maybe there's a better more "reactive" method of doing this?

            if (el.dataset.index != listItem.props.index && el.classList.contains('selected') ) {
                el.classList.remove('selected');
            }
        });
    },

    render: function() {
        return (
            <li ref={"listSel"+this.props.key}
                data-value={this.props.value}
                data-index={this.props.index}
                className={this.state.isSelected == true ? 'selected' : '' } 
                onClick={this.handleClick.bind(null, this)}>
                {this.props.content}
            </li>
        );
    }
});

var SelectableList = React.createClass({

    render: function() {

        var listItems = this.props.options.map(function(opt, index) {
            return <ListItem key={index} index={index} 
                        value={opt.value} content={opt.label}
                        onListItemChange={this.props.onListItemChange.bind(null, index)} />;
        }, this);

        return <ul className="cs-select">{ listItems }</ul>;
    }

})

var CustomSelect = React.createClass({

    getInitialState: function () {
        return {
            selectedOption: ''
        }
    },

    handleListItemChange: function(listIndex, listItem) {
        this.setState({
            selectedOption: listItem.props.value
        })
    },

    render: function () {

        var options = [{value:"One", label: "One"},{value:"Two", label: "Two"},{value:"Three", label: "Three"}];

        return (
            <div className="group">
                <div className="cs-select">
                    <SelectableList options={options} 
                        onListItemChange={this.handleListItemChange} />
                    <SelectBox className="cs-select" 
                        initialValue={this.state.selectedOption} 
                        fieldName="custom-select" options={options}/>
                </div>
            </div>
        )
    } 
})

module.exports = CustomSelect;

Answer 1

The parent component should pass a callback to the children, and each child would trigger that callback when its state changes. You could actually hold all of the state in the parent, using it as a single point of truth, and pass the "selected" value down to each child as a prop.

In that case, the child could look like this:

var Child = React.createClass({
    onToggle: function() {
        this.props.onToggle(this.props.id, !this.props.selected);
    },

    render: function() {
        return <button onClick={this.onToggle}>Toggle {this.props.label} - {this.props.selected ? 'Selected!' : ''}!</button>;
    }
});

It has no state, it just fires an onToggle callback when clicked. The parent would look like this:

var Parent = React.createClass({
    getInitialState: function() {
        return {
            selections: []
        };
    },
    onChildToggle: function(id, selected) {
        var selections = this.state.selections;

        selections[id] = selected;

        this.setState({
            selections: selections
        });
    },

    buildChildren: function(dataItem) {
        return <Child
            id={dataItem.id}
            label={dataItem.label}
            selected={this.state.selections[dataItem.id]}
            onToggle={this.onChildToggle} />
    },

    render: function() {
        return <div>{this.props.data.map(this.buildChildren)}</div>
    }
});

It holds an array of selections in state and when it handles the callback from a child, it uses setState to re-render the children by passing its state down in the selected prop to each child.

You can see a working example of this here:

https://jsfiddle.net/fth25erj/