react-layer-stack

Description

I've designed react-layer-stack to fix one of the most tricky problems React users are facing with: bottom-top UI communication (modals, drag'n'drops, popovers, popups, windows). The lib allows to hold (or share) context (closure) of deep children components with the top layers: you can use variables from closure (which will propagate automatically if you'll provide it to use property of Layer). Anonymous function which renders Layer into LayerStackMountPoint receives: layer info (state, index in stack), callbacks (to show and hide layers) and event data from the toggle which controlls this Layer.

Real-world usage example

Public API consist 2 key components: Layer, LayerStackMountPoint and 1 additional: LayerToggle (sometimes toggle needs to know which popover is open now). Set the LayerStackMountPoint somewhere on the top of the tree:

import { LayerStackMountPoint } from 'react-layer-stack'
// ...
//  render() {
        return (
          <Container>
            <LayerStackMountPoint />
            <AppBar />
            <Container className={styles.container}>
              {children}
            </Container>
          </Container>
    )
//  }

Define your Layer. This example shows how to propagate variables from lexical context (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Closures) to the Layer, which will be displayed in the LayerStackMountPoint. Each layer should have an id and use properties. use property is needed to determine if we should update the lexical context of the anonymous function which renders Modal into Layer if Cell is re-rendered.

import { Layer, LayerToggle } from 'react-layer-stack'
// ... for each `object` in array of `objects`
const modalId = 'DeleteObjectConfirmation' + objects[rowIndex].id
return (
    <Cell {...props}>
        // the layer definition. The content will show up in the LayerStackMountPoint when `show(modalId)` be fired in LayerToggle
        <Layer use={[objects[rowIndex], rowIndex]} id={modalId}> {({
            hideMe, // alias for `hide(modalId)`
            index } // useful to know to set zIndex, for example
            , e) => // access to the arguments (click event data in this example)
          <Modal onClick={ hideMe } zIndex={(index + 1) * 1000}>
            <ConfirmationDialog
              title={ 'Delete' }
              message={ "You're about to delete to " + '"' + objects[rowIndex].name + '"' }
              confirmButton={ <Button type="primary">DELETE</Button> }
              onConfirm={ this.handleDeleteObject.bind(this, objects[rowIndex].name, hideMe) } // hide after confirmation
              close={ hideMe } />
          </Modal> }
        </Layer>
        
        // this is the toggle for Layer with `id === modalId` can be defined everywhere in the components tree
        <LayerToggle id={ modalId }> {({showMe}) => // showMe is alias for `show(modalId)`
          <div style={styles.iconOverlay} onClick={ (e) => showMe(e) }> // additional arguments can be passed (like event)
            <Icon type="trash" />
          </div> }
        </LayerToggle>
    </Cell>)
// ...

One important thing to know

Currently we use the redux store as a backend, but that could be changed in the future. Consider it just as an initialization logic and not as the public API. Therefore you should add the layers reducer to the store:

import { DEFAULT_STORE_KEY as DEFAULT_LAYERS_STORE_KEY, reducer as layersReducer } from 'react-layer-stack'
// ...
const reducer = combineReducers({...reducers, [DEFAULT_LAYERS_STORE_KEY]: layersReducer})

Images to understand the whole thing

View layers stack

Layer id and "use" property (sym/soft link)

TODO:

• examples
• tests