What is react-select?
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.
{"import Select from 'react-select';\n\nconst options = [\n { value: 'chocolate', label: 'Chocolate' },\n { value: 'strawberry', label: 'Strawberry' },\n { value: 'vanilla', label: 'Vanilla' }\n];\n\nconst MyComponent = () => (\n <Select options={options} />\n);"}
Multi-Select
This feature enables users to select multiple options from the dropdown. It is useful for fields that require more than one selection.
{"import Select from 'react-select';\n\nconst options = [\n { value: 'chocolate', label: 'Chocolate' },\n { value: 'strawberry', label: 'Strawberry' },\n { value: 'vanilla', label: 'Vanilla' }\n];\n\nconst MyComponent = () => (\n <Select isMulti options={options} />\n);"}
Asynchronous Loading
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.
{"import Select from 'react-select';\nimport AsyncSelect from 'react-select/async';\n\nconst loadOptions = (inputValue, callback) => {\n setTimeout(() => {\n callback(filterOptions(inputValue));\n }, 1000);\n};\n\nconst MyComponent = () => (\n <AsyncSelect loadOptions={loadOptions} />\n);"}
Creatable Select
This feature allows users to create a new option on the fly if the option they are looking for is not available in the list.
{"import CreatableSelect from 'react-select/creatable';\n\nconst options = [\n { value: 'chocolate', label: 'Chocolate' },\n { value: 'strawberry', label: 'Strawberry' },\n { value: 'vanilla', label: 'Vanilla' }\n];\n\nconst MyComponent = () => (\n <CreatableSelect isMulti options={options} />\n);"}
Other packages similar to react-select
downshift
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
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.
antd
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
The Select control for React. Initially built for use in KeystoneJS.
See react-select.com for live demos and comprehensive docs.
See our upgrade guide for a breakdown on how to upgrade from v2 to v3.
React Select is funded by Thinkmill and Atlassian. It represents a whole new approach to developing powerful React.js components that just work out of the box, while being extremely customisable.
Features include:
- Flexible approach to data, with customisable functions
- Extensible styling API with emotion
- Component Injection API for complete control over the UI behaviour
- Controllable state props and modular architecture
- Long-requested features like option groups, portal support, animation, and more
If you're interested in the background, watch Jed's talk on React Select at ReactNYC in March 2018.
See our upgrade guide for a breakdown on how to upgrade from v1 to v2.
The old docs and examples will continue to be available at v1.react-select.com.
Installation and usage
The easiest way to use react-select is to install it from npm and build it into your app with Webpack.
yarn add react-select
Then use it in your app:
import React from 'react';
import Select from 'react-select';
const options = [
{ value: 'chocolate', label: 'Chocolate' },
{ value: 'strawberry', label: 'Strawberry' },
{ value: 'vanilla', label: 'Vanilla' },
];
class App extends React.Component {
state = {
selectedOption: null,
};
handleChange = selectedOption => {
this.setState({ selectedOption });
console.log(`Option selected:`, selectedOption);
};
render() {
const { selectedOption } = this.state;
return (
<Select
value={selectedOption}
onChange={this.handleChange}
options={options}
/>
);
}
}
Props
Common props you may want to specify include:
autoFocus
- focus the control when it mountsclassName
- apply a className to the controlclassNamePrefix
- apply classNames to inner elements with the given prefixisDisabled
- disable the controlisMulti
- allow the user to select multiple valuesisSearchable
- allow the user to search for matching optionsname
- generate an HTML input with this name, containing the current valueonChange
- subscribe to change eventsoptions
- specify the options the user can select fromplaceholder
- change the text displayed when no option is selectedvalue
- control the current value
See the props documentation for complete documentation on the props react-select supports.
Controllable Props
You can control the following props by providing values for them. If you don't, react-select will manage them for you.
value
/ onChange
- specify the current value of the controlmenuIsOpen
/ onMenuOpen
/ onMenuClose
- control whether the menu is openinputValue
/ onInputChange
- control the value of the search input (changing this will update the available options)
If you don't provide these props, you can set the initial value of the state they control:
defaultValue
- set the initial value of the controldefaultMenuIsOpen
- set the initial open value of the menudefaultInputValue
- set the initial value of the search input
Methods
React-select exposes two public methods:
focus()
- focus the control programaticallyblur()
- blur the control programatically
Customisation
Check the docs for more information on:
Thanks
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this project. It's been a wild ride.
If you like React Select, you should follow me on twitter
Shout out to Joss Mackison, Charles Lee, Ben Conolly, Dave Brotherstone, Brian Vaughn, and the Atlassian Design System team ❤️
License
MIT Licensed. Copyright (c) Jed Watson 2019.