masonic

Masonic

A React virtualized, autosizing masonry component for the window based upon Brian Vaughn's react-virtualized and further inspired by react-window.

Installation

Find Masonic on NPM

yarn add masonic or npm i masonic

Example

Check out the demo on CodeSandbox

Requirements

React >16.8 is a minimum requirement because this package relies on and provides React hooks.

Motivation

The only use case I have ever had for a masonry component is relative to the browser window. Brian's Masonry component is great in its performance and versatility, but I wanted something more directly suited to my growing needs for scalable masonry layout. I also desired something with an API that more closely matched react-window's awesome API.

API Documentation

<Masonry>

An autosizing virtualized masonry component which only renders items currently visible in the window.

import {Masonry} from 'masonic'

const items = []
for (let i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
  items.push({id: i})
}

const EasyMasonryComponent = props => (
  <Masonry items={items}>
    {({index, data, width}) => (
      <div>
        <div>
          Index: {index}
        </div>
        <pre>
          {JSON.stringify(data)}
        </pre>
        <div>
          Column width: {width}
        </div>
      </div>
    )}
  </Masonry>
)

Prop types

Column rendering

• columnWidth
  • <number> required
  • default 240
  • This is the minimum column width. Masonic will automatically size your columns to fill its container based on your provided columnWidth and columnGutter values. It will never render anything smaller than this defined width unless its container is smaller than its value.
• columnGutter
  • <number>
  • default 0
  • This defines the amount of vertical and horizontal space in pixels to display between the rendered items
• columnCount
  • <number>
  • By default, Masonic derives the column count from the provided minimum column width. However, in some situations it is nice to be able to override that behavior (e.g. when creating a <List>)

Item rendering

• render
  • <React.Component|function> required
  • alias children
  • This is the component which is rendered for each item in items below. It receives 3 properties from Masonic:
    • index
      • `
      • The index of the item in the items array below
    • data
      • <any>
      • The data provided by items[index] from the items array below
    • width
      • The width of the column containing this component. This is highly useful for better estimating the sizes of things like images.
• items
  • <array> required
  • An array of items to render. The data contained here is used for creating the data property passed to your render component. It is also used for the onRender callback and the itemKey generator. Its length is used for determining the estimated height of the container.
• itemHeightEstimate
  • <number>
  • default 300
  • This value is used for estimating the initial height of the Masonry container element. Though unimportant at face value, it is vital to the UX of the scrolling behavior and in determining how many items to initially render.
• itemAs
  • <React.Component|string|function>
  • default div
  • This determines the element type created by React when creating the position wrappers for the rendered items. A common use case would be changing this to li and the as prop to ul.
• itemStyle
  • <object>
  • This appends additional inline styles to the position wrappers for rendered items.
• itemKey(item: any, index: number)
  • <function>
  • The value returned by this function must be unique to its item.
  • By default, an item's index will be used as its key. This is okay if:
    • Your collections of items is never modified
    • Your render component is not stateful and does not extend PureComponent
  • e.g. itemKey={data => data.id}

Customizing the container element

• as
  • <React.Component|function|string>
  • default div
  • This is useful if for example you'd like the container element to be of the node type ul
• id
  • <string>
  • An custom ID to apply to the container
• className
  • <string>
  • A custom class name to apply to the container
• style
  • <object>
  • Additional inline styles to apply to the container
• role
  • <string>
  • default grid
  • An accessibility role to apply to the container
• tabIndex
  • <number>
  • default 0
  • A tabindex value to apply to the container. Used for accessibility.

Window properties

• initialWidth
  • <number>
  • default 1280
  • An initial width to provide to the window scroller when the window is not defined, i.e. in SSR.
• initialHeight
  • <number>
  • default 720
  • An initial height to provide to the window scroller when the window is not defined, i.e. in SSR.
• overscanBy
  • <number>
  • default 2
  • This is used for determining the number of elements outside of the visible window to pre-render
    • This value is multiplied by the height of the window. By defining 2 you're saying 'render enough elements to fill two windows'.
    • Overscanning allows the tab key to focus on the next (not yet visible) item
    • Overscanning can slightly reduce or prevent a flash of empty space when a user first starts scrolling.
• windowScroller
  • <object>
  • An object which defines option for the underlying window scroll position and size tracker. Its properties are:
  • scroll
    • <object>
    • fps
      • <number>
      • default 8
      • The frames per second to throttle the window scroll position updates to. The default of 8 effectively means the scroll position will only update 8 times in 1 second, or once every 125ms.
  • size
    • <object>
    • wait
      • <number>
      • default 120
      • Window resize events are debounced to avoid doing wayyyy too much reflow work when the window size changes. This value specifies the amount of time to wait until those resize events stop firing before the event is actually allowed to trigger, and the size is measured. 120 is a sane default, as it feels instantaneous when you stop resizing and it doesn't do too much work in the interim.

Callbacks

• onRender(startIndex: number, stopIndex: number, items: array)
  • <function>
  • This callback fires any time the items rendered in the visible window change.
  • startIndex
    • <number>
    • The index of the first item most recently rendered.
  • stopIndex
    • <number>
    • The index of the last item most recently rendered.
  • items
    • The array of items provided in the items prop

Methods

When a ref is provided to this component, you'll have access to its following methods:

• clearPositions(): void
  • Clears the position cache of the component. This is primarily used for resetting the position state when you want to render a completely different array of items. You could also provide a unique key property to the <Masonry> component to achieve similar.

---

<List>

An autosizing virtualized list component which only renders items currently visible in the window. This is just a single-column Masonry component.

Prop types

This component inherits all of the props listed in <Masonry> with exception to columnWidth, columnCount, and columnGutter which are discarded.

• rowGutter
  • <number>
  • This defines the amount of vertical space in pixels to display between the rendered items

---

useInfiniteLoader(loadMoreItems: function, opt: object): onRenderCallback

A React hook for seamlessly creating an infinite scrolling Masonry or List component.

import {Masonry, useInfiniteLoader} from 'masonic'

const fetchMoreItems = memoize(
  (startIndex, stopIndex) => fetch(
    `/api/get-more?after=${startIndex}&limit=${startIndex + stopIndex}`
  ).then(
    items => {
      // do something to add the new items to your state
    }
  )
)

const InfiniteMasonry = props => {
  const maybeLoadMore = useInfiniteLoader(fetchMoreItems)
  return <Masonry {...props} onRender={maybeLoadMore}/>
}

Arguments

• loadMoreItems
  • <function> required
  • This callback will be invoked when more items must be loaded.
  • It should implement the following signature:
    • (startIndex: number, stopIndex: number, items: array): Promise
  • The returned Promise should be resolved once row data has finished loading.
  • It will be used to determine when to refresh the list with the newly-loaded data.
  • This callback may be called multiple times in reaction to a single scroll event. As such, you are expected to memoize/track whether or not you've already received the startIndex, stopIndex, items values to prevent loading data more than once.
• opt
  • <object>
  • isItemLoaded
    • <function>
    • default (index, items) => items[index] !== undefined
    • Function responsible for determining the loaded state of each item.
    • It should implement the following signature:
      • (index: number, items: array): boolean
  • minimumBatchSize
    • <number>
    • default 16
    • Minimum number of items to be loaded at a time. This property is used to batch requests to reduce HTTP requests.
  • threshold
    • <number>
    • default 16
    • A threshold at which to pre-fetch data.
    • The default value of 16 means that data will start loading when a user scrolls within 16 items.
  • totalItems
    • <number>
    • default 9E9
    • The total number of items you'll need to eventually load (if known). This can be arbitrarily high if not known (as such, the default value).

---

Differences from react-virtualized/Masonry

There are actually quite a few differences between these components and the originals, despite the overall design being highly inspired by them.

1. The original component requires a <CellMeasurer>, cellPositioner, and cellMeasurerCache. In Masonic this functionality is built in and uses resize-observer-polyfill for tracking cell size changes.

2. This component will auto-calculate the number of columns to render based upon the defined columnWidth property. The column count will update any time it changes.

3. The implementation for updating cell positions and sizes is also much more efficient in this component because only specific cells and columns are updated when cell sizes change, whereas in the original a complete reflow is triggered.

4. This component only renders relative to its parent container's width and the browser window's height. The original component is tuned for rendering inside a parent container and not the window.

5. The API is a complete rewrite and because of much of what is mentioned above, is much easier to use in my opinion.

Credits

• Everyone who worked on react-virtualized
• Mikola Lysenko for his binary-search-bounds and interval-tree-1d