Creating strongly-typed refs in class components

In this lesson, we learn how to get a strongly-typed reference to an element in a class component.

Understanding createRef #

In this lesson, we are going to implement the Search component we implemented in the last lesson as a class component. Below is a first attempt:

class Search extends React.Component {
  private input = React.useRef<HTMLInputElement>(null);
  
  componentDidMount() {
    if (this.input.current) {
      this.input.current.focus();
    }
  }

  render() {
    return (
      <form>
        <input ref={this.input} type="type" />
      </form>
    );
  }
}

What is wrong with this implementation?

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