react-popper

What is react-popper?

The react-popper package is a React wrapper around the Popper.js library, which is a positioning engine to ensure popovers, tooltips, and similar floating elements are positioned correctly relative to their reference elements, even in complex scenarios like inside scrolling containers or when the viewport size changes. It provides a set of React hooks and components to integrate Popper.js functionality in a React-friendly way.

What are react-popper's main functionalities?

Tooltip positioning

This code demonstrates how to use the `usePopper` hook to create a tooltip that is positioned relative to a button. The tooltip's position is automatically updated to ensure it remains correctly placed relative to the button, even if the layout changes.

{"import React from 'react';\nimport { usePopper } from 'react-popper';\n\nfunction Tooltip() {\n  const [referenceElement, setReferenceElement] = useState(null);\n  const [popperElement, setPopperElement] = useState(null);\n  const { styles, attributes } = usePopper(referenceElement, popperElement);\n\n  return (\n    <>\n      <button ref={setReferenceElement}>Hover over me</button>\n      <div ref={setPopperElement} style={styles.popper} {...attributes.popper}>\n        Tooltip content\n      </div>\n    </>\n  );\n}"}

Dropdown menu

This example shows how to create a dropdown menu using `usePopper`. The dropdown's visibility is toggled by clicking a button, and its position is dynamically adjusted to stay aligned with the button.

{"import React, { useState } from 'react';\nimport { usePopper } from 'react-popper';\n\nfunction Dropdown() {\n  const [referenceElement, setReferenceElement] = useState(null);\n  const [popperElement, setPopperElement] = useState(null);\n  const [visible, setVisible] = useState(false);\n  const { styles, attributes } = usePopper(referenceElement, popperElement);\n\n  return (\n    <>\n      <button ref={setReferenceElement} onClick={() => setVisible(!visible)}>Toggle Dropdown</button>\n      {visible && (\n        <div ref={setPopperElement} style={styles.popper} {...attributes.popper}>\n          Dropdown content\n        </div>\n      )}\n    </>\n  );\n}"}

Other packages similar to react-popper

tippy.js

Tippy.js is a highly customizable tooltip and popover library that wraps around Popper.js, similar to react-popper but with a broader focus on tooltips and popovers. It offers a wide range of animations, themes, and interactive options out of the box, making it more feature-rich for specific tooltip and popover use cases compared to the more general positioning capabilities of react-popper.

floating-ui

Floating UI is the successor to Popper.js and offers direct React integration through its own React package. It provides low-level primitives for positioning floating elements, similar to react-popper, but with an updated API and additional features to handle more complex positioning scenarios. It's a more modern alternative with active development focusing on addressing limitations found in Popper.js.

README

React Popper

React wrapper around Popper.js.

Install

Via package managers:

npm install react-popper@next --save
# or
yarn add react-popper@next

Via script tag (UMD library exposed as ReactPopper):

<script src="https://unpkg.com/react-popper/dist/react-popper.js"></script>

Usage

Using react-popper@0.x? You can find its documentation clicking here

Example:

import { Manager, Reference, Popper } from 'react-popper';

const Example = () => (
  <Manager>
    <Reference>
      {({ ref }) => (
        <button type="button" ref={ref}>
          Reference element
        </button>
      )}
    </Reference>
    <Popper placement="right">
      {({ ref, style, placement, arrowProps }) => (
        <div ref={ref} style={style} data-placement={placement}>
          Popper element
          <div ref={arrowProps.ref} style={arrowProps.style} />
        </div>
      )}
    </Popper>
  </Manager>
);

react-popper makes use of a React pattern called "render prop", if you are not familiar with it, please read more on the official React documentation.

Using React <=15 or Preact? The components created with them don't support to return fragments, this means that you will need to wrap <Reference /> and <Popper /> into a <div /> to make react-popper work.

API documentation

The Manager component is a simple wrapper that needs to surround all the other react-popper components in order to make them communicate with each others.

The Popper component accepts the properties children, placement, modifiers, eventsEnabled and positionFixed.

<Popper
  placement="right"
  modifiers={{ preventOverflow: { enabled: false } }}
  eventsEnabled={true}
  positionFixed={false}
>
    { props => [...] }
</Popper>

children

children: ({|
  ref: (?HTMLElement) => void,
  style: { [string]: string | number },
  placement: ?Placement,
  outOfBoundaries: ?boolean,
  scheduleUpdate: () => void,
  arrowProps: {
    ref: (?HTMLElement) => void,
    style: { [string]: string | number },
  },
|}) => Node

A function (render prop) that takes as argument an object containing the properties ref, style, placement, andarrowProps.

The first 3 properties are the ref property that is going to be used to retrieve the React refs of the popper element, the style property, which contains the CSS styles (React CSS properties) computed by Popper.js and needed to style the popper element so that it gets positioned in the desired way.
These styles should be applied to your React component using the style prop or with any CSS-in-JS library of your choice.

The placement property describes the placement of your popper after Popper.js has applied all the modifiers that may have flipped or altered the originally provided placement property. You can use this to alter the style of the popper and or of the arrow according to the definitive placement. For instance, you can use this property to orient the arrow to the right direction.

scheduleUpdate is a function you can call to schedule a Popper.js position update. It will directly call the Popper#scheduleUpdate method.

The arrowProps argument is an object, containing a style and ref properties that are identical to the ones provided as first and second argument of children, but are relative to the arrow element rather than the popper. Use them to, accordingly, retrieve the ref of the arrow element and style it.

placement

placement?: PopperJS$Placement;

One of the accepted placement values listed in the Popper.js documentation.
Your popper is going to be placed according to the value of this property.
Defaults to bottom.

outOfBoundaries: ?boolean;

A boolean that can be used to hide the popper element in case it's overflowing from its boundaries. Read more.

eventsEnabled

eventsEnabled?: boolean;

Tells react-popper to enable or disable the Popper.js event listeners. true by default.

positionFixed

Set this property to true to tell Popper.js to use the position: fixed strategy to position the popper element. By default it's false, meaning that it will use the position: absolute strategy.

modifiers

modifiers?: PopperJS$Modifiers;

An object containing custom settings for the Popper.js modifiers.
You can use this property to override their settings or to inject your custom ones.

Usage with ReactDOM.createPortal

Popper.js is smart enough to work even if the popper and reference elements aren't in the same DOM context.
This means that you can use ReactDOM.createPortal (or any pre React 16 alternative) to move the popper component somewhere else in the DOM.

This can be useful if you want to position a tooltip inside an overflow: hidden container that you want to make overflow. Please note that you can also try the positionFixed strategy to obtain a similar effect with less hassle.

import { Manager, Reference, Popper } from 'react-popper';

const Example = () => (
  <Manager>
    <Reference>
      {({ ref }) => (
        <button type="button" ref={ref}>
          Reference
        </button>
      )}
    </Reference>
    {ReactDOM.createPortal(
      <Popper>
        {({ placement, ref, style }) => (
          <div ref={ref} style={style} data-placement={placement}>
            Popper
          </div>
        )}
      </Popper>,
      document.querySelector('#destination')
    )}
  </Manager>
);

Usage without a reference HTMLElement

Whenever you need to position a popper based on some arbitrary coordinates, you can provide Popper with a referenceElement property that is going to be used in place of the referenceProps.getRef React ref.

The referenceElement property must be an object with an interface compatible with an HTMLElement as described in the Popper.js referenceObject documentation, this implies that you may also provide a real HTMLElement if needed.

If referenceElement is defined, it will take precedence over any referenceProps.ref provided refs.

import { Popper } from 'react-popper';

class VirtualReference {
  getBoundingClientRect() {
    return {
      top: 10,
      left: 10,
      bottom: 20,
      right: 100,
      width: 90,
      height: 10,
    };
  }

  get clientWidth() {
    return this.getBoundingClientRect().width;
  }

  get clientHeight() {
    return this.getBoundingClientRect().height;
  }
}

// This is going to create a virtual reference element
// positioned 10px from top and left of the document
// 90px wide and 10px high
const virtualReferenceElement = new VirtualReference();

// This popper will be positioned relatively to the
// virtual reference element defined above
const Example = () => (
  <Popper referenceElement={virtualReferenceElement}>
    {({ ref, style, placement, arrowProps }) => (
      <div ref={ref} style={style} data-placement={placement}>
        Popper element
        <div ref={arrowProps.ref} style={arrowProps.style} />
      </div>
    )}
  </Popper>
);

Flow and TypeScript types

This library is built with Flow but it supports TypeScript as well.

You can find the exported Flow types in src/index.js, and the TypeScript definitions in typings/react-popper.d.ts.

Running Locally

clone repo

git clone [e-mail]:souporserious/react-popper.git

move into folder

cd ~/react-popper

install dependencies

npm install or yarn

run dev mode

npm run demo:dev or yarn demo:dev

open your browser and visit:

http://localhost:1234/