calendar-blocks

🗓🧱 calendar-blocks

yarn add calendar-blocks

Flexible, customizable React calendar / date-picker primitives.

• Compose your own Calendar UI easily with keyboard navigation
• Supports single-date and range selection
• Exposes internal state via context (write your own controls!)
• Highly in-depth attributes for full styling control

A low-level library

Let's get off on the right foot - this isn't an out-of-the-box date picker. The functionality works with very little code, but it won't look pretty! On the flip side, since there's few assumptions about rendering, you've got full control. You don't even have to make it a grid if you don't want to.

So I can show you some 'basic' example code like this, which is mostly state-keeping:

import { Calendar, CalendarDay, CalendarDays } from 'calendar-blocks';

const now = new Date();

const DatePicker = () => {
  // which month / year are we looking at?
  const [{ month, year }, setViewInfo] = useState<{
    month: number;
    year: number;
  }>({
    month: now.getMonth(),
    year: now.getFullYear(),
  });
  // what date is selected?
  const [value, setValue] = useState<Date | null>(null);

  return (
    // the calendar manages selection state and reports changes
    <Calendar
      displayMonth={month}
      displayYear={year}
      value={value}
      onChange={setValue}
      onDisplayChange={setViewInfo}
    >
      <CalendarDays>
        {(day) => <CalendarDay value={day} key={day.key} />}
      </CalendarDays>
    </Calendar>
  );
};

But you should know this won't look like a calendar. It'll just be a list of buttons for each day in the month!

It's not so hard to make a grid in modern CSS, though. For inspiration, check out the examples directory and Storybook examples. calendar-blocks is flexible enough to accomplish many layouts, including virtualized grids!

Other things calendar-blocks doesn't do

• CSS styling of any kind
• Providing month names or buttons to navigate between months and years (the state is in your domain already, so you can implement this with normal buttons or fancy swipe gestures at your discretion)
• Providing visual details like day-of-the-week headers (these don't require any logic and are pretty dependent on your layout - but they often fit quite well into an existing CSS grid once you've set it up, see the examples)
• Localization. Calendar does allow you to supply a custom week start day - which can be computed for your locale using a module like weekstart. However, this library doesn't support any other kinds of calendars besides Gregorian.

Keyboard navigation

One of the primary features of calendar-blocks is providing keyboard navigation and selection bindings seamlessly for you. Render CalendarDay components within a Calendar, and the user can move between them with their keyboard. This includes sensible 2-d navigation, using Home and End for week navigation, and Page Up and Page Down for month navigation. It also automatically invokes changes to the displayMonth and displayYear when the user moves across month boundaries.

You can disable days, and selection will respect this. Users can still navigate along disabled days, but cannot select them. Range selection will prevent the user from selecting a range which includes a disabled day.

Display state vs. selection state

This library separates state into 'display' and 'selection.' Display state is what determines which days the user sees. Selection state tracks the date or range of date's they've selected. If you're using this as a date picker, selection state is your value/onChange equivalent - but you still need to track display state.

There's not a whole lot to it though. Display state is month and year - and selection state is value. Those are the 3 values you need to track.

How keyboard navigation works

I used the 'roving tab' method to implement keyboard interaction with the calendar. The calendar assigns tabIndex=0 to the 'highlighted' day, and -1 to all other days. The user can then use the arrow keys to move between days, and the calendar will update the highlighted day. Only the highlighted day is keyboard-focusable, and when the user tabs back to the calendar their focus will return to the last highlighted day.

Day element attributes

The CalendarDay component applies all kinds of data attributes to the rendered button, so you can do some heavy style customization.

Here's a list:

• data-selected: whether the day is selected
• data-highlighted: whether the user is highlighting the day (via focus or hover)
• data-highlighted-inactive: when the calendar doesn't have focus, this attribute is applied to the highlighted day instead of data-highlighted. It's best not to visually highlight the day while focus is not within the calendar, but you can still use this attribute to style it in a way that bookmarks where the 'cursor' is while the user is interacting elsewhere.
• data-disabled: if the day doesn't match true from your supplied getDateEnabled function or if the disabled prop is true on the CalendarDay, this attribute is applied to the day.
• data-invalid-hover: if the user hovers a day which they cannot select as part of a range, this attribute is applied to the day. This happens when a range would include disabled days.
• data-today: whether the day is today
• data-date-number: The visual date number (1-31)
• data-day-number: The day of the week as an index (0-6)
• data-day-first: If this is the first day of the month
• data-day-last: If this is the last day of the month
• data-different-month: If a CalendarDay is rendered within a Calendar but its displayMonth and displayYear don't match the Calendar's displayMonth and displayYear, it will have this attribute. This occurs for days in the week prior to the first day of the month, for example - if a month starts on a Wednesday, it will be preceded by 3 days from the previous month. To hide these days, use a CSS rule which adds visibility: hidden to days with this attribute.
• data-first-row: If this day is in the first row on the calendar grid
• data-last-row: If this day is in the last row on the calendar grid
• data-first-column: If this day is in the first column on the calendar grid
• data-last-column: If this day is in the last column on the calendar grid
• data-top-edge: If this day is in the first 7 days of the month. Days with this attribute all have a 'top edge' in the calendar grid, and you can use the attribute to render them that way.
• data-bottom-edge: If this day is in the last 7 days of the month. Days with this attribute all have a 'bottom edge' in the calendar grid, and you can use the attribute to render them that way.
• data-range-start: If this day is the start of a range selection
• data-range-end: If this day is the end of a range selection
• data-in-range: If this day is in the range selection but not the start or end
• data-weekend: If this day is a weekend

CalendarDayValue

The CalendarDay component accepts an object which wraps a native Date and provides some additional details which are needed for rendering. In most cases you don't need to worry about this, just pass a value from CalendarDays into the value prop of CalendarDay.

The contents of the CalendarDayValue object are currently:

• date: the native Date object
• isDifferentMonth: whether the day is in a different month than the calendar is currently displaying

The value supplied by CalendarDays (or useCalendarDayList) also has a key property which you can use for a convenient React key value while iterating.

Other tools: hooks, utilities, etc

This library exposes some of its internal logic so you can get even more customized.

The main example of this is useCalendarDayList, which is a hook that replicates the functionality of the CalendarDays component. With this hook you can skip using that component and directly get a list of days which would appear in a square calendar grid for the given month.

There's also useCalendarDay, which reads a parent Calendar context and returns the CalendarDayValue which can be passed to a CalendarDay component. This can help you build custom iteration of days within a Calendar, which is especially useful for infinite windowed lists.

Finally, all of the utility helpers used to determine where dates are rendered with a grid, if days are equal, if a day falls within a range, etc are also exported for your convenience if you should need them for customized behaviors.

For full details, see the TypeDoc