React Native : Communicating between native and React native

In react native, it maintains a hierarchy of components, in which each component depends only on its parent and its own internal state. We do this with properties: data is passed from a parent to its children in a top-down manner. If an ancestor component relies on the state of its descendant, one should pass down a callback to be used by the descendant to update the ancestor.

The same concept applies to React Native. As long as we are building our application purely within the framework, we can drive our app with properties and callbacks. But, when we mix React Native and native components, we need some special, cross-language mechanisms that would allow us to pass information between them.


Mainly two approaches

1. Properties
2. Events and Native Modules

In order to embed a React Native view in a native component, we use RCTRootView. RCTRootView is a UIView that holds a React Native app. It also provides an interface between native side and the hosted app.

RCTRootView has an initializer that allows you to pass arbitrary properties down to the React Native app. The initialProperties parameter has to be an instance of NSDictionary. The dictionary is internally converted into a JSON object that the top-level JS component can reference.

NSArray *imageList = @[@"http://foo.com/bar1.png",
                       @"http://foo.com/bar2.png"];

NSDictionary *props = @{@"images" : imageList};

RCTRootView *rootView = [[RCTRootView alloc] initWithBridge:bridge
                                                 moduleName:@"ImageBrowserApp"
                                          initialProperties:props];





References
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/communication-ios