When you need re-render, but it doesn't happen...

Mar 14, 2025

I already have had this issue and was surprised by this behaviour, but I forgot this — and wasted 2 hours on debugging. I suspected component’s library, checked contexts, and tried to find problems in composition.

So, what happened? In our App.tsx:

<Router history={history}>
    <UuiContext.Provider value={services}>
        <Header />
        <Routes />
        <Footer />
    </UuiContext.Provider>
</Router>

In Header.tsx — navigation:

// it's component from library, responsible for highlighting active menu item
// use uuiContext from UuiContext.Provider and check is link active using history
<MainMenu>
    <MainMenuButton caption='Home' link={{pathname: '/' } />
    <MainMenuButton caption='Dashboard' link={{pathname: '/dashboard' } />
</MainMenu>

And it works… almost. When you click on buttons in MainMenu url is updated, content is re-rendered. But there is no highlighting for active menu item in MainMenu.

Started with MainMenu.tsx: add breakpoint in function defining is link active. But on button clicks and changing url this function is not called. And component is not re-rendered.

Add console.log(‘render’) in Header.tsx. So, it is also not re-rendered. Despite updating the history object, and seeing those updates reflected in uuiContext.uuiRouter.history, nothing was triggering a re-render. Why don’t children of UuiContext.Provider update?

At this point, I went down a rabbit hole: tried to debug in contexts, because I thought that I have several instances and something weird happens. Found nothing, of course.

But after all this debugging, idea occurred to me: content is re-rendered because of changing actual Route, what if I put Header in corresponded pages? It worked, but in this case Header unmounted and mounted each time route changes. It’s not good user experience.

And then finally I asked right thing: how React and React Router define, what should be re-rendered? Results of answering on this question:

we update history
history object is stable reference, so you cannot track changes with useEffect and history.location dependency
but useLocation and useParams watch changes location, and when we use them — our component re-renders after changes

So I just added to Header.tsx:

useLocation();

//...same code

The most annoying thing about that I already have solved problem like this, but remembered about it only when I found solution again. Writing it down this time so I’ll remember 🤪