Null event properties in a React callback

When you use setState with the new (in React 0.13) callback argument, all the Event object properties are null inside the callback. How can you update this.state based on the value of the event target?

handleEvent(event) {
  /* Fails! event.target is null */
  setState(function() { return {text: event.target.value}; });
  }

<input onChange={this.handleEvent}/>

The easiest workaround is to extract the information you need from the event outside the callback:

handleEvent(event) {
  var text = event.target.value;
  setState(function() { return {text: text}; });
}

event.target is null inside the callback because React recycles events objects for performance reasons: React passes the same Event object for multiple event handler calls, resetting the object properties each time. So by the time React executes the setState callback, the Event object has already lost its previous properties.

If for some reason you need the full event inside the callback, you can call event.persist() as suggested in the Github issue.