React Context API & HOC

Question

I've been reading up on the new context API and have a question regarding using it alongside HOC to inject props instead of directly wrapping every child that needs access to some state with a Consumer.

Isn't the above achievable without context? Isn't it possible to just house some state in a HOC and inject that into wrapped components that need access?

Answer 1

The documentation explains the use case where a lot of components need to access the common theme , and hence can be wrapped with an HOC. without the context , you can make use of HOCs state to store the variable and pass on to the components wrapped with HOC but all of these components will have a different instance of the state and won't react to the theme change together.

Context makes it possible to store the data centrally and all listeners/consumers will react to the change together.

Answer 2

It is possible but each wrapped component will have it's own data passed from HOC. While using context, this data is shared between components.

So changing data in a context will make all Consumers re-render, while HOC will work only for the wrapped component.