react-progression

The problem

You need to manage a step-based workflow and you want to be able to move between steps. You also want the flexibility to be able to control the rendering of your steps.

This solution

This is a component that manages the state of your steps while providing you the flexibility to render your workflow in any way that you need to. It uses a render prop to give you the flexibility you need to render your workflow without having to think about managing the state of which step is active.

Installation

npm install --save react-progression

Usage

import Progression from 'react-progression';

function SimpleWorkflow({ steps }) {
  return (
    <Progression
      steps={steps}
      render={({ getSteps, getStepActions }) => {
          const { activatePreviousStep, activateNextStep } = getStepActions();
          const { previousStep, activeStep, nextStep } = getSteps();
          return (
            <div>
              {previousStep !== undefined ? <button onClick={activatePreviousStep}>Previous</button> : null}
              {React.cloneElement(activeStep)}
              {nextStep !== undefined ? <button onClick={activateNextStep}>Next</button> : null}
            </div>
          )}}
    />
  );
}

function App() {
  const steps = [
    <div id='step-1'>I am the first step</div>,
    <div id='step-2'>I am the second step</div>,
    <div id='step-3'>I am the third step</div>,
    <div id='step-4'>I am the fourth step</div>,
    <div id='step-5'>I am the fifth step</div>
  ];

  return <SimpleWorkflow steps={steps} />;
}

Progression is the only component. It does not render anything itself. It calls the render function and renders that.

Props

steps

arrayOf(PropTypes.object) | required

Pass an array of steps that will be used by the component to determine the previous, active, and next steps

initialStep

PropTypes.object

The step that will be set as the first active step.

render

PropTypes.func | required

This is called with an object. Read more about the properties passed to the render function in the section "Render Function prop".

Render Function prop

This is the function that will determine what to render based on the state of the Progression component. The function is passed as the render prop <Progression steps={[...]} render={/* here */} />.

getStepActions

These are actions that can be invoked to change the state of the Progression component

property	type	description
activateFirstStep	function()	Activate the first step in the progression regardless of its current state
activateLastStep	function()	Activate the last step in the progression regardless of its current state
activatePreviousStep	function()	Activate the previous step in the progression. If there is no previous step to activate, this is a noop
activateNextStep	function()	Activate the next step in the progression. If there is no next step to activate, this is a noop
createStepActivator	function(selector: Function)	Activate a step based on the selector function

getSteps

These are the steps from the array that can be used within render

property	type	description
previousStep	object / undefined	The step that was previously active
activeStep	object	The step that is currently active
nextStep	object / undefined	The step that will be activated next

Inspiration

The goal was to make a simple API for managing workflow states while still giving a lot of flexibility control to the users. The methods used in this project were inspired by Kent C. Dodds and his work on the downshift project.

License

MIT