reactjs - Can you force a React component to rerender without calling setState?

itemprop="text">

I have an external (to the component),
observable object that I want to listen for changes on. When the object is updated it
emits change events, and then I want to rerender the component when any change is
detected.

With a top-level
React.render this has been possible, but within a component it
doesn't work (which makes some sense since the render method
just returns an object).

Here's a code
example:

export default class MyComponent extends
            React.Component {

 handleButtonClick() {

            this.render();
 }


 render() {

            return (
 

 {Math.random()}
             onClick={this.handleButtonClick.bind(this)}>
 Click me

            
 
 )


            }
}

Clicking
the button internally calls this.render(), but that's not what
actually causes the rendering to happen (you can see this in action because the text
created by {Math.random()} doesn't change). However, if I
simply call this.setState() instead of
this.render(), it works
fine.

So I guess my question
is: do React components need to have state in order
to rerender? Is there a way to force the component to update on demand without changing
the state?

itemprop="text">

class="normal">Answer

In your
component, you can call this.forceUpdate() to force a rerender.

Documentation: href="https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/react-component.html#forceupdate"
rel="noreferrer">https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/component-api.html