useImperativeHandle in React & React Native

Member-only story

🚀 Mastering useImperativeHandle in React & React Native: A Beginner’s Guide

Abvhishek kumar
Stackademic
Published in
4 min readFeb 10, 2025

--

🔹 Introduction

React provides various hooks to manage state, effects, and refs. One lesser-known but powerful hook is useImperativeHandle. It allows you to customize the instance value that is exposed when using React.forwardRef. This is especially useful when working with imperative actions in functional components.

In this blog, we’ll explore: ✅ What useImperativeHandle does
✅ Why and when to use it
✅ A practical example with step-by-step implementation in React and React Native
✅ Pros and cons of using useImperativeHandle

🔹 What is useImperativeHandle?

useImperativeHandle is a React Hook that allows a parent component to call functions inside a child component using refs.

Syntax:

useImperativeHandle(ref, createHandle, [dependencies])
  • ref → The forwarded ref from React.forwardRef.
  • createHandle → A function that returns an object with methods exposed to the parent.
  • [dependencies] → If specified, re-runs only when dependencies change.

🔹 When to Use…

--

--

Published in Stackademic

Stackademic is a learning hub for programmers, devs, coders, and engineers. Our goal is to democratize free coding education for the world.

Written by Abvhishek kumar

A React Native front-end developer & freelance engineer from New Delhi, India, passionate about elegant interfaces & top-notch code.

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?