createBrowserHistory with a specific window object

[voliva]

Inspired from this article https://hackernoon.com/using-a-react-16-portal-to-do-something-cool-2a2d627b0202 and trying to do a desktop Electron app which takes some seconds to initialize (parsing all own + vendor JS, fetching initial data from servers, etc.), I'm trying to spawn new windows and skipping this initialization, by using React portals.

For example, in a view I have a button "Contacts" which will popup the window with the Contacts component for the user to browse. By using this method, I can create an about:blank window, render everything in there by using a Portal, and that window will share the same state as the parent window.

In case that, for some reason, the popup window gets refreshed (the users presses Ctrl+R, or whatever), I can set the URL of the popup window by replaceState to a URL that I can define as a route, so when it gets refreshed it will go through all initialization (oh well...) and render the same component.

The problem I have though is if that Contacts component has some nested routes on it, as the code is running on the parent window AND the Router was initialized with it, all routes are based on the parent window, not on the popup window - So when I'm navigating the Contacts component, the URL gets replaced on the parent window which makes it harder to keep both window URLs in sync and it gets really impractical (because the parent window gets URL changes without changing any view)

If createBrowserHistory accepted a Window object as an option, then I could create a new history object every time I'm popping out a new window, and declare a new Router that uses that history object for that specific window.

[gragland]

@voliva Did you ever figure out a solution to this? Trying to do the same thing.

[mjackson]

Thank you for bringing this to our attention, @voliva. I'd definitely like to add this feature, not only to browser history but to hash as well. I'll get it on the roadmap.

[mjackson]

Just a heads up, in the v5 beta released today you can now do:

var history = createBrowserHistory({ window: iframe.contentWindow });

Please give it a shot and LMK how it goes!