New Rule Proposal: enforce return in render() method

[silvenon]

It sometimes happens to me that I forget to return JSX content in the render method. This rule would warn if the return statement is missing.

[bsbeeks]

I run into this use case as well. It's fairly easy to catch with the React errors in the browser, but having a rule to help catch it before hand would be great. @yannickcr I can put together a PR for this if it's a rule we want to add.

Proposed Rule Name: require-render-return

[ljharb]

What about returning null? What about returning the contents of a function call (which may or may not contain jsx)?

If this is just ensuring that a render method returns something, that's fine, but I'm skeptical about the value it will add.

[bsbeeks]

In my mind the rule would just check for a return statement in the render method. It wouldn't care about what it's returning. The value add would probably depend on the project and the component. I'm not sure how to measure that value, but I know it'd be useful for our projects at MX (especially for newbie devs)

[yannickcr]

If this is just ensuring that a render method returns something, that's fine, but I'm skeptical about the value it will add.

Same for me, but if you send a PR for this @bsbeeks I don't really see reasons to refuse it.

[silvenon]

You can always bypass certain rules in some way, you can do const { props } = this and now using props.foo won't check if foo is defined in propTypes.

If a component returns an invalid value, there's not much the plugin can do about it. These concerns are clearly separated. The rule would be just a faster way to see that you forgot to return the JSX.