Getting React Component by name

Here's a function to traverse and transform into a tree structure a react component hierarchy. Just access component's name with c.constructor.name:

const {
  isDOMComponent,
  getRenderedChildOfCompositeComponent,
  findRenderedComponentWithType
} = React.addons.TestUtils;

function traverse(c, node) {
  if (isDOMComponent(c)) {
    return;
  }

  node.children.push({
    name: c.constructor.name,
    children: []
  });

  const ccc = getRenderedChildOfCompositeComponent(c);

  if (isDOMComponent(ccc)) {
    React.Children.forEach(ccc.props.children, function traverseCompositeChildrenOf(child) {
      if (child.type) {
        const cccc = findRenderedComponentWithType(ccc, child.type);
        traverse(cccc, getNode(node, c.constructor.name));
      }
    });
  } else {
    traverse(ccc, getNode(node, c.constructor.name));
  }
}

Use it like this:

const root = React.render(<Root/>, document.createElement('div'));

let tree = {
    name,
    children: []
};

let tree = traverse(root, tree); // your component hierarchy by name in a tree

taken from this repo

If you don't want vertical composition, you can use a ref.
Otherwise they be references passed as props in the case of descendants accessing ancestor components, or held in scope in the case of ancestors accessing descendants components.

https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/more-about-refs.html Refs in principle allow more horizontal composition, but really if you are doing a lot of this you might want to think about your data model, and implementation of something like Flux / unidirectional data flow. That's a pointer from the docs actually ; they recommend you to think carefully about data structure & state. (see https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/more-about-refs.html#cautions)

In your case I would recommend having a function passed as prop to all components where they can trigger a state change to set most recently viewed component. You just need also to pass them a unique id as prop.

[...] Assuming you have control over the programmatic response of components to being selected, you should pass all components a common handler function which resides in a common ancestor component. It would take as argument an index which would uniquely identify the component. That function would update state and React would issue a new Render cycle.