reactjs / reactjs/react.dev

Order of life cycle method calls with error boundaries is unexpected

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Dominant language
JavaScript
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Description

I have a requirement for my app to track when a component has completed rendering and whether the render ended in success or failure. I expected to be able to use the componentDidMount/componentDidUpdate life cycle methods along with an error boundary's componentDidCatch method to handle both success and failure cases.

However, I am noticing that the order of the life cycle methods is not what I expect. When an exception is raised within a child component in the error boundary, the component's componentDidMount/componentDidUpdate method will get called first before componentDidCatch. So I can't simply use componentDidMount/componentDidUpdate to determine that my scenario ended in success.

Is this a bug? How would I go about achieving this scenario?

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First steps

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Research direction

No file, test, or entry point is named. Start by locating the React documentation covering componentDidMount, componentDidUpdate, componentDidCatch, and error boundaries, then verify the reported lifecycle ordering. Done means the expected behavior and a supported way to distinguish successful and failed rendering are clearly documented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript, react
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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