After struggling to find good documentation for react in some senses particularly when you get to uncommon areas I thought I would make a video - showing my work in react. Most of my time has been spent in npm and gulp I must say getting the build to work right !
The problem was trying to do it the wrong way - the way it is show in a few online tuts.
If your component needs to unmount then and mount then beware of the effects within the component class, watch for the issues I faced.
The Solution
It did feel like a bad way (generally a good indicator) of doing what I was doing. I felt that the component in this case could be kind of dumb. Yet a couple of blog posts on using FLUX pattern with facebook DISPATCH class said to bind to events from the view using a custom event system. This was working well for me however I started to play with the logic and rendering the components or not - which is a useful way to go in some situations. The solution was quite simply to look to a store for the state from a getter. If you now pulled this component out and placed it somewhere else that breaks and what some people will say is tight coupling but equally the listening to the event caused a bigger time loss due to silent failure. So go figure and the experience I have with this stuff pays off again.