Request: Expose getImageSource()

[andrioid]

Is it possible to expose getImageSource on the icon-set components?

I've tried adding it myself, but no luck yet.
Seems like the NativeIconAPI is not available, so I can't just add the method.

I would really appreciate a clarification and hopefully a fix.

I'll leave the doc link in the rnvi readme.
https://github.com/oblador/react-native-vector-icons#usage-as-png-imagesource-object

[brentvatne]

I can be convinced for why this is needed, but the only reason I can see is to use it with ToolBarAndroid or TabBarIOS, and I don't recommend using either of those, so we'll need more than that. Tagged as wontfix until then!

[andrioid]

Just for arguments sake, I'd like to hear why you wouldn't recommend using standard components from the react-native project. Some of us try to strive for that "native look" and that's just easier with actual native components..

My use-case is, as you mentioned TabBarIOS and ToolBarAndroid.

As for the 'wontfix' tag - that's fair. I imagine that the more native stuff you guys support, the more native code there is to maintain and most stuff can be done in JS anyway.

Can I suggest a little foot-note to the icon-documentation mentioning that getImageSource is not supported and that you recommend against using TabBarIOS and ToolbarAndroid?

[brentvatne]

@andrioid - sure. I don't recommend using them because they are not cross-platform and can be easily re-created using react-native components, and they are less flexible even on the platform they do work on than just using a rebuilt one with react-native components. Is there some particular behavior you see in TabBarIOS and ToolBarAndroid that you don't get with just using the react-navigation tab bar and navigation bar? If so, we should improve react-navigation accordingly

[brentvatne]

Oops, forgot to mention the footnote -- yeah we should do this. I have had an open issue here for a while to warn or throw an error with TabBarIOS and vector-icons, if you could add a note to README and/or add some warning/error at runtime and send a PR this would be very helpful!

[dannin]

How do we use the icons in a MapView without getImageSource @brentvatne?

[brentvatne]

@dannin - use images i suppose

[oxyii]

+1, I need getImageSource

[klase]

Why is this tagged wontfix? How else would you use the icons on a map view?

[brentvatne]

use a static image @klase, i don't see why this needs to be done at runtime

[klase]

@brentvatne In our case we load the markers from a json file and since only local image resources are allowed to be used in react-native-maps, it seems odd to include assets twice when we already reference the icon set elsewhere (for tab navigation for example).

[brentvatne]

@klase - you can make it a remote image local by downloading it with FileSystem.downloadAsync :) so there is a workaround for now.

i definitely empathize with what you're saying from an ergonomics point of view though - it seems easier to just get the image source from the font at runtime. i'd be open to a proposal for a more generic module in expo to do this, but i don't think we should add it to the vector-icons lib and make it inherently coupled to icons.

[oxyii]

Looks like @expo/vector-icons does not include react-native-vector-icons NATIVE modules, so @expo/vector-icons cannot expose RNVI native methods... But babel-preset-expo trying to tell us that this is a complete analogue. Unfortunately, it is not. And I don't think that we will be able to convince expo members of the opposite