The react-select npm package is a flexible and customizable select input control for React applications. It provides a powerful set of features that allow developers to create simple dropdowns, multi-selects, async data loading, and more, with a focus on accessibility and customizability.
What are react-select's main functionalities?
Basic Single Select
This feature allows you to create a basic single selection dropdown where a user can select one option from a predefined list.
This feature allows for loading options asynchronously, which is useful when the options are not available at initial render time or need to be fetched based on user input.
Downshift is a set of primitives to build simple, flexible, WAI-ARIA compliant enhanced input React components. Its major focus is on flexibility and providing the building blocks for creating custom dropdown components. It is more low-level than react-select and requires more boilerplate to achieve similar functionality.
React-autosuggest is a WAI-ARIA compliant React autosuggest component that provides a simple yet customizable input field with suggestions. While it is similar to react-select in providing suggestions, it does not offer as many features out of the box, such as multi-select or async options.
Ant Design (antd) is a design system with a set of high-quality React components, one of which is a Select component. It offers a comprehensive suite of features similar to react-select but is part of a larger framework, which might be more than needed if only a select component is required.
React-Select
A Select control built with and for React. Initially built for use in KeystoneJS.
This project is quite stable and ready for production use, however there are plans to improve it including:
CSS Styles and theme support (working, could be improved)
Documentation website (currently just examples)
Custom options rendering (in progress)
It's loosely based on Selectize (in terms of behaviour and user experience) and React-Autocomplete (as a native React Combobox implementation), as well as other select controls including Chosen and Select2.
Installation
The easiest way to use React-Select is to install it from NPM and include it in your own React build process (using Browserify, etc).
npm install react-select --save
You can also use the standalone build by including dist/select.js and dist/default.css in your page. If you use this, make sure you have already included the following dependencies:
React-Select generates a hidden text field containing the selected value, so you can submit it as part of a standard form. You can also listen for changes with the onChange event property.
Options should be provided as an Array of Objects, each with a value and label property for rendering and searching. You can use a disabled property to indicate whether the option is disabled or not.
The value property of each option should be set to either a string or a number.
When the value is changed, onChange(newValue, [selectedOptions]) will fire.
You can enable multi-value selection by setting multi={true}. In this mode:
Selected options will be removed from the dropdown menu
The values of the selected items are joined using the delimiter property to create the input value
A simple value, if provided, will be split using the delimiter property
The onChange event provides an array of the selected options as the second argument
The first argument to onChange is always a string, regardless of whether the values of the selected options are numbers or strings
By default, only options in the options array can be selected. Setting allowCreate to true allows new options to be created if they do not already exist.
Async options
If you want to load options asynchronously, instead of providing an options Array, provide a asyncOptions Function.
The function takes two arguments String input, Function callbackand will be called when the input text is changed.
When your async process finishes getting the options, pass them to callback(err, data) in a Object { options: [] }.
The select control will intelligently cache options for input strings that have already been fetched. The cached result set will be filtered as more specific searches are input, so if your async process would only return a smaller set of results for a more specific query, also pass complete: true in the callback object. Caching can be disabled by setting cacheAsyncResults to false (Note that complete: true will then have no effect).
Unless you specify the property autoload={false} the control will automatically load the default set of options (i.e. for input: '') when it is mounted.
var Select = require('react-select');
var getOptions = function(input, callback) {
setTimeout(function() {
callback(null, {
options: [
{ value: 'one', label: 'One' },
{ value: 'two', label: 'Two' }
],
// CAREFUL! Only set this to true when there are no more options,
// or more specific queries will not be sent to the server.
complete: true
});
}, 500);
};
<Select
name="form-field-name"
value="one"
asyncOptions={getOptions}
/>
Filtering options
You can control how options are filtered with the following properties:
matchPos: "start" or "any": whether to match the text entered at the start or any position in the option value
matchProp: "label", "value" or "any": whether to match the value, label or both values of each option when filtering
ignoreCase: Boolean: whether to ignore case or match the text exactly when filtering
matchProp and matchPos both default to "any".
ignoreCase defaults to true.
Advanced filters
You can also completely replace the method used to filter either a single option, or the entire options array (allowing custom sort mechanisms, etc.)
filterOption: function(Object option, String filter) returns Boolean. Will override matchPos, matchProp and ignoreCase options.
filterOptions: function(Array options, String filter, Array currentValues) returns Array filteredOptions. Will override filterOption, matchPos, matchProp and ignoreCase options.
For multi-select inputs, when providing a custom filterOptions method, remember to exclude current values from the returned array of options.
Further options
Property | Type | Description
:-----------------------|:--------------|:--------------------------------
addLabelText | string | text to display when allowCreate is true
allowCreate | bool | allow new options to be created in multi mode (displays an "Add <option> ?" item when a value not already in the options array is entered)
asyncOptions | func | function to call to get options
autoload | bool | whether to auto-load the default async options set
backspaceRemoves | bool | whether pressing backspace removes the last item when there is no input value
className | string | className for the outer element
clearable | bool | should it be possible to reset value
clearAllText | string | title for the "clear" control when multi: true
clearValueText | string | title for the "clear" control
delimiter | string | delimiter to use to join multiple values
disableCache | bool | disables the options cache for asyncOptions
disabled | bool | whether the Select is disabled or not
filterOption | func | method to filter a single option: function(option, filterString)
filterOptions | func | method to filter the options array: function([options], filterString, [values])
ignoreCase | bool | whether to perform case-insensitive filtering
inputProps | object | custom attributes for the Input (in the Select-control) e.g: {'data-foo': 'bar'}
matchPos | string | (any, start) match the start or entire string when filtering
matchProp | string | (any, label, value) which option property to filter on
multi | bool | multi-value input
name | string | field name, for hidden tag
noResultsText | string | placeholder displayed when there are no matching search results
onBlur | func | onBlur handler: function(event) {}
onChange | func | onChange handler: function(newValue) {}
onFocus | func | onFocus handler: function(event) {}
optionRenderer | func | function which returns a custom way to render the options in the menu
options | array | array of options
placeholder | string | field placeholder, displayed when there's no value
searchable | bool | whether to enable searching feature or not
searchPromptText | string | label to prompt for search input
value | any | initial field value
valueRenderer | func | function which returns a custom way to render the value selected
Contributing
See our CONTRIBUTING.md for information on how to contribute.
The npm package react-select receives a total of 3,800,643 weekly downloads. As such, react-select popularity was classified as popular.
We found that react-select demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago.It has 5 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
Package last updated on 26 Aug 2015
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