React - setting focus on body element / understanding refs - reactjs

So I'm trying to understand how to move focus when a new page loads in my application. This question came to my mind: what could I do if I want to focus on some element that is somewhere outside of my component. It seems to me that everywhere they write about the focus it's always used with refs. You can pass ref to a child. What if I want to focus on element to reset the focus on the page when a link is clicked and new page component is loaded? Or if I want to make skip link component higher in the tree and focus on a header in element? I have a lot of components, it doesn't seem a great idea to pass refs down through several components.
I feel like I'm missing something.
I'm interested about this because I'm learning about accessibility and how to make possible to navigate page only with keyboard.

what could I do if I want to focus on some element that is somewhere
outside of my component.
What if I want to focus on element to reset the focus on the page when
a link is clicked and new page component is loaded?
You can just pass callback of focus handler into your inner component and call it when you want.

Related

React & Canvas: changing state is breaking Canvas functions

I am trying to use a parent component to control animations in a child Canvas element. Specifically I want an animation to happen when a user inputs a correct answer.
It works until the user changes the state in the parent component, and then it no longer works.
I've made a stripped-back, minimal version of my code here to show my issue: https://codesandbox.io/s/epic-leaf-08jqvy?file=/src/App.js
My desired behaviour is that the red box bounces when a user clicks submit. That happens if they don't type anything in the input box, but as soon as you enter anything into there - changing state and re-rendering the component - the button no longer triggers the animation in the Canvas child component.
As far as I can tell, the issue is to do with changing the state when inputing text. If I make a version where the input is just assigned to a variable, it works fine, but I need to be able to use state and re-render other parts of it.
I have put a console.log in the jump() function, so I can see that it is being called, but no animation is taking place in the canvas.
I assume that what's happening is that everything is being re-rendered when the state changes, and so the useRef is no longer tracking to the right thing.
Things I've tried:
putting the canvas in a memoized component to prevent it from re-rendering
using eventlisteners to see if I can trigger the animations in other ways - keydown ones work, but I need the user to be able to type, so I tried other ones (like hashchange or audio.play) but neither of those worked.
You can see the thing I'm actually trying to build here: https://papaya-platypus-86565f.netlify.app/play Basically users answer questions and an animation plays depending on whether they're right or wrong, to give it a game-y feel.
Thanks!
I like your red box as well as your reasoning. Yes, the input state changing on keystroke is causing the entire App component to re-render. Note that your App.js component has a lot going on (all good stuff), such as your Box class instantiation, your canvas instantiation, etc.
The key is to break your components into smaller parts, particularly separating stateful components from non-stateful components. We don't want your canvas re-mounting on every input change, so we make them sibling components!
Here's a working example of your code, just in smaller components:
https://codesandbox.io/s/strange-julien-d3n4zm
I hope this helps.

React state issue (a bad setState?) when trying to show a component composed with styled components

Now I am not entirely sure what confluence of things brought this issue to a head, but lets start with my minimal reproduction
What am I trying to do
I want to show a styled element that is composed from various "inherited" members inside of a modal. Once the element is clicked, it will dismiss the modal.
Actual results
For some reason the element triggers it's onClick early, as soon as you click the button that is actually supposed to open the modal. It is only because it's a styled component (I think). If I change the element from a Para to a normal p, it behaves correctly.
I'm wondering, what can cause this? Is it that I nested too much? The error I get is
Warning: Cannot update a component (`App`) while rendering a different component (`Styled(Styled(styled.div))`). To locate the bad setState() call inside `Styled(Styled(styled.div))`, follow the stack trace as described in https://reactjs.org/link/setstate-in-render
The issue here is that you're spreading ...rest in your Para styled-component. Remove it from ./Para.js and it should work as expected

React check if component is in focus from a TabView

I have a TabView component that has multiple tabs containing components. These components have entire hierarchies of other components. How could I know from any child component nested arbitrarily deep in one of these hierarchies whether or not it's parent tab is in focus in the TabView?
Preferably, I would want to implement this similar to react-navigation's withNavigationFocus (or an equivalent hook) so that any component can know if it's in tab focus without having to pass props down the chain of components. I'm thinking you could have a TabViewContext that components can register themselves as focus listeners to by doing a useContext. The TabViewContext would be provided by the TabView and the TabView would be responsible for determining what registered listeners are in focus when tabs change. My dilemma is I don't know how the TabView could determine efficiently what nested child components come into focus when the tab changes. Any ideas?
In case the other parent tabs are hidden, you could test for visibility in plain JS, rather than have a much more complex solution...
Checkout this answer on how to do this.
So components that care about the visibility of their parent tab could use a ref for their own DOM elements and test whether they're visible or not. You could build this into a simple helper function or a hook
EDIT:
I'd suggest going with something like this:
Each Tab will provide a context with method for any descendant to register a callback that will be called when the Tab is hidden. The TabView can pass a "isVisible" prop to each tab (if it doesn't already), so Tab can know when its display changes.
When a Tab changes from visible to hidden. All registered callbacks will be called.
I would of course write a hook or a helper function to create this TabVisibilty context so each Tab component can use it in a reusable manner.

Detecting click outside React component and single state for hover

I have made a navbar, which holds a searchbar, and 3 icons.
On clicking these icons, a modal is rendered.
I wanted help with two things.
Closing the modals on outside clicks!, and
The hover element is slow because it has three states, every time it is called it re-renders the code from bottom to top. I wanted the hover to have one state assigned to one parent element. But on doing that, the hover effect for all three buttons gets activated at the same time.
Code is up on : https://codesandbox.io/s/unruffled-snowflake-he95w
Please feel free to edit the code and pass me the edited fork.
I have tried handleBlur, passing an event, and eventListener.
https://codesandbox.io/s/unruffled-snowflake-he95w
Expected - Modal rendered on screen should get disappeared on clicking outside the modal.
P.S - semantic UI icons are not rendering, but they are there. They will activate if you hover over them.
Credits - SVG close icon problem solved by Drew Reese.
Ah, I see. Your ToolBar is the controlling component, i.e. the state about whether or not each toolbar item is open is stored there. You need to pass a close handler to the children components so when a "close" button is clicked it is calling the callback the parent passed in.
Here is a fork of your sandbox where I pass in an onCloseClick callback to the calendar/picker thing that simply toggles that state value back to false to close it. The picker then just assigns that callback as its onClick handler for the contaning for the close button.
You can apply the same logic to the other two components.
Note: since the icons aren't rendering for me either I added some text to the buttons so they are easier to find/see.

React - to manipulate DOM or use state?

This Is more of a "theoretical" question that often buffles me in different situations and use cases, I will give a simple example to demonstrate it.
Let's say I have a list of 10 buttons.
Everrytime I click a button, a floating menu appears on top of the clicked button - there is only one menu visible for any given time.
Let's assume that I can't render this floating menu within the button component and I can only render it in the buttons parent level (meaning that this menu is sibling to those buttons).
I have 2 possible options to do that:
Keep the x,y position of the last clicked button and render the menu in this given position
Render the menu once and using "ref" to directly relocate the menu
On the one hand, the first approach seems more "Reactish". On the other hand, the possible implemention I can think of is pretty ugly (capturing the clicked item position and saving it to state which triggers defender), and further more, I am not so sure about re re rendering the whole container just because I need to move a small piece of it.
The second approach touches the DOM directly using refs. Although possible , doing DOM manipulations sometimes feel bad to me.
Is there a better approach? Which of the 2 makes more sense?
Any suggestion or thoughts will be appreciated!
Thanks
React uses whats called a virtual DOM, which is a representation of the DOM, that sits on top of the real browser DOM. Whenever you update state or a user performs an action the virtual DOM compares and checks the changes with the real DOM and then updates the UI accordingly.
So if certain DOM elements like a are not different between changes it does not get re rendered, only the DOM elements that have changed are re rendered. And if a property on a DOM element is changed, only the property is updated and the DOM element is not re rendered.
<div color="blue" />
to
<div color="red" />
The whole element is not destroyed and re created, only the property is changed.
However if the element in the host tree is different than the entire host tree is destroyed and recreated.
<div />
to
<p>
This is refereed to as reconciliation
https://reactjs.org/docs/reconciliation.html
So using refs is definitely more of a hacky solution since its more of an escape hatch and directly manipulates the DOM.
I would definitely stick with option 1, I think there is an elegant solution to the use case you described, it would involve just adding a click event listener in the componentDidMount and keeping track of the click position that way.
And also its hard to say without code but since your buttons will be the same, they will not be re rendered only the menu will.
Would recommend for further reading
https://overreacted.io/react-as-a-ui-runtime/

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