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 (
      <div>
        {Math.random()}
        <button onClick={this.handleButtonClick.bind(this)}>
          Click me
        </button>
      </div>
    )
  }
}

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?