How can I get real elment by node id? react-native

The code to do it changed recently when React / React Native common code was moved around, but what I would suggest is to check out Inspector code and available methods on the ReactNativeComponentTree

More specifically, the following code should do the trick for you:

var ReactNativeComponentTree = require('react/lib/ReactNativeComponentTree');
ReactNativeComponentTree.getInstanceFromNode(nativeTag);

This is how I ended up resolving similar situation for myself. It doesn't follow the same approach by any means but did it the trick!

onItemPressed(item) {
  this.props.navigateForward(item.sceneId);
  this.props.closeDrawer();
}

render() {
  var listItems = [];

  for (var i=0; i < this.props.navigation.scenes.length; i++) {
    var item = this.props.navigation.scenes[i];

    listItems.push(<ListItem
      onPress={this.onItemPressed.bind(this, item)}
      key={i}
      title={item.title}
      leftIcon={{name: item.icon}}
      underlayColor={colors.lightPrimary}
      containerStyle={styles.menuItemStyle}
      titleStyle={styles.menuItemTitle}
    />);
  }


  return (
    <View style={styles.container}>
      <List containerStyle={styles.listContainer}>
        {listItems}
      </List>
    </View>
  )
};

In case somebody stumbles on that question, ReactNativeComponentTree was removed from version 0.56 or so.

However, I found a much cleaner way to detect a tap on a certain (sub-)element:

import React from 'React';
import {
  Text,
  TouchableOpacity,
  View,

  findNodeHandle
} from 'react-native';

class TestClass extends React.Component {
  onTap = (evt) => {
    // Retrieve the handle of the second <Text> node
    let elementHandle = findNodeHandle(this.refs["element"]);

    // Check if the tapped element's node-id equals the retrieved one 
    if (evt.nativeEvent.target == elementHandle) {
      // Do something when element was clicked
      console.log("Second <Text> node was tapped")
    }
  }

  render() {
    return (
      <TouchableOpacity onPress={this.onTap}>
        <View>
          <Text>Hi there!</Text>
          <Text ref="element">Only detect this element</Text>
        </View>
      </TouchableOpacity>
    );
  }
};

Basically, we are just using a reference (ref) to access the node-id of an element using findNodeHandle.

We then compare that node-id with the nativeEvent.target node-id in order to check if a sub-element was tapped.

In the above example, only the second <Text> node produces an output.