Business
Jobs
  • About Us
  • Solutions
    • Job Postings
      Post your job and receive qualified candidates in 48h.
    • Candidate Assessments
      500+ technical and psychological tests, plus anti-fraud.
    • Headhunting
      Tailor-made executive search from start to finish.
    • Payroll + EOR
      Payroll dispersal and EOR across 15+ LATAM countries.
  • Pricing
  • Jobs

0

174
Views
React useState hook event handler using initial state

I'm still getting my head around react hooks but struggling to see what I'm doing wrong here. I have a component for resizing panels, onmousedown of an edge I update a value on state then have an event handler for mousemove which uses this value however it doesn't seem to be updating after the value has changed.

Here is my code:

export default memo(() => {
  const [activePoint, setActivePoint] = useState(null); // initial is null

  const handleResize = () => {
    console.log(activePoint); // is null but should be 'top|bottom|left|right'
  };

  const resizerMouseDown = (e, point) => {
    setActivePoint(point); // setting state as 'top|bottom|left|right'
    window.addEventListener('mousemove', handleResize);
    window.addEventListener('mouseup', cleanup); // removed for clarity
  };

  return (
    <div className="interfaceResizeHandler">
      {resizePoints.map(point => (
        <div
          key={ point }
          className={ `interfaceResizeHandler__resizer interfaceResizeHandler__resizer--${ point }` }
          onMouseDown={ e => resizerMouseDown(e, point) }
        />
      ))}
    </div>
  );
});

The problem is with the handleResize function, this should be using the latest version of activePoint which would be a string top|left|bottom|right but instead is null.

over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo
3 answers
Answer question

0

useRef to read future value

Currently, your issue is that you're reading a value from the past. When you define handleResize it belongs to that render, therefore, when you rerender, nothing happens to the event listener so it still reads the old value from its render.

To fix this, you should use a ref via useRef that you keep updated so that you can read the current value.

Example (link to jsfiddle):

  const [activePoint, _setActivePoint] = React.useState(null);

  // define a ref
  const activePointRef = React.useRef(activePoint);

  // in place of original `setActivePoint`
  const setActivePoint = x => {
    activePointRef.current = x; // keep updated
    _setActivePoint(x);
  };

  const handleResize = () => {
    // now when reading `activePointRef.current` you'll
    // have access to the current state
    console.log(activePointRef.current);
  };

  const resizerMouseDown = /* still the same */;

  return /* return is still the same */
over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo Report

0

You have access to current state from setter function, so you could make it:

const handleResize = () => {
  setActivePoint(activePoint => {
    console.log(activePoint);
    return activePoint;
  })
};
over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo Report

0

  const [activePoint, setActivePoint] = useState(null); // initial is null

  const handleResize = () => {
    setActivePoint(currentActivePoint => { // call set method to get the value
       console.log(currentActivePoint);  
       return currentActivePoint;       // set the same value, so nothing will change
                                        // or a different value, depends on your use case
    });
  };

over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo Report
Answer question
Find remote jobs

Discover the new way to find a job!

Top jobs
Top job categories
Business
Post vacancy Pricing Sales
Legal
Terms and conditions Privacy policy
© 2026 PeakU Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Andres GPT
Show me some job opportunities
There's an error!