react-virtualized

What is react-virtualized?

The react-virtualized npm package provides efficient rendering of large lists and tabular data by only rendering the items that are currently visible within the viewport. This can significantly improve the performance of applications that need to display large amounts of data.

What are react-virtualized's main functionalities?

List

The List component allows you to render large lists of items efficiently. It only renders the rows that are currently visible to the user, based on the scroll position.

{"import { List } from 'react-virtualized';

function MyList({ list }) {
  return (
    <List
      width={300}
      height={300}
      rowCount={list.length}
      rowHeight={20}
      rowRenderer={({ index, key, style }) => (
        <div key={key} style={style}>
          {list[index]}
        </div>
      )}
    />
  );
}"}

Table

The Table component is used for rendering large data sets in a tabular format. Similar to List, it only renders the rows that are visible in the viewport.

{"import { Column, Table } from 'react-virtualized';

function MyTable({ list }) {
  return (
    <Table
      width={1000}
      height={300}
      headerHeight={20}
      rowHeight={30}
      rowCount={list.length}
      rowGetter={({ index }) => list[index]}
    >
      <Column label='Name' dataKey='name' width={100} />
      <Column label='Age' dataKey='age' width={200} />
    </Table>
  );
}"}

Grid

The Grid component can render a virtualized grid of cells, which is useful for displaying data in a spreadsheet-like format. It renders only the cells that are currently in the viewport.

{"import { Grid } from 'react-virtualized';

function MyGrid({ columnCount, rowCount }) {
  return (
    <Grid
      columnCount={columnCount}
      columnWidth={100}
      height={300}
      rowCount={rowCount}
      rowHeight={30}
      width={300}
      cellRenderer={({ columnIndex, key, rowIndex, style }) => (
        <div key={key} style={style}>
          {`R${rowIndex}, C${columnIndex}`}
        </div>
      )}
    />
  );
}"}

InfiniteLoader

The InfiniteLoader component works with List, Table, or Grid to load more items as the user scrolls. It's useful for implementing 'infinite scroll' features where more data is fetched as needed.

{"import { InfiniteLoader, List } from 'react-virtualized';

function MyInfiniteList({ list, loadMoreRows }) {
  const isRowLoaded = ({ index }) => !!list[index];

  return (
    <InfiniteLoader
      isRowLoaded={isRowLoaded}
      loadMoreRows={loadMoreRows}
      rowCount={list.length}
    >
      {({ onRowsRendered, registerChild }) => (
        <List
          ref={registerChild}
          onRowsRendered={onRowsRendered}
          width={300}
          height={300}
          rowCount={list.length}
          rowHeight={20}
          rowRenderer={({ index, key, style }) => (
            <div key={key} style={style}>
              {list[index]}
            </div>
          )}
        />
      )}
    </InfiniteLoader>
  );
}"}

Other packages similar to react-virtualized

react-window

React-window is a complete rewrite of react-virtualized by the same author. It offers similar functionality but with a smaller and faster core. It's designed to be more approachable and easier to use than react-virtualized.

react-infinite

React-infinite is another package for rendering large lists of elements within a scrolling container. It differs from react-virtualized in its API and the way it handles infinite loading, but it also aims to provide efficient rendering for large lists.

react-virtuoso

React-virtuoso is a virtual list component with a simple API that supports variable-sized items and sticky headers. It provides a different approach to virtualization compared to react-virtualized, focusing on simplicity and automatic handling of item heights.

react-list

React-list is a versatile infinite scroll React component. It offers several modes for rendering lists, including simple, variable, and uniform heights. It's a simpler alternative to react-virtualized with fewer features but can be easier to integrate in some cases.

README

React components for efficiently rendering large lists and tabular data. Check out the demo for some examples.

If you like this project, 🎉 become a sponsor or ☕ buy me a coffee

Sponsors

The following wonderful companies have sponsored react-virtualized:

Learn more about becoming a sponsor!

A word about react-window

If you're considering adding react-virtualized to a project, take a look at react-window as a possible lighter-weight alternative. Learn more about how the two libraries compare here.

Getting started

Install react-virtualized using npm.

npm install react-virtualized --save

ES6, CommonJS, and UMD builds are available with each distribution. For example:

// Most of react-virtualized's styles are functional (eg position, size).
// Functional styles are applied directly to DOM elements.
// The Table component ships with a few presentational styles as well.
// They are optional, but if you want them you will need to also import the CSS file.
// This only needs to be done once; probably during your application's bootstrapping process.
import 'react-virtualized/styles.css';

// You can import any component you want as a named export from 'react-virtualized', eg
import {Column, Table} from 'react-virtualized';

// But if you only use a few react-virtualized components,
// And you're concerned about increasing your application's bundle size,
// You can directly import only the components you need, like so:
import AutoSizer from 'react-virtualized/dist/commonjs/AutoSizer';
import List from 'react-virtualized/dist/commonjs/List';

Note webpack 4 makes this optimization itself, see the documentation.

If the above syntax looks too cumbersome, or you import react-virtualized components from a lot of places, you can also configure a Webpack alias. For example:

// Partial webpack.config.js
{
  alias: {
    'react-virtualized/List': 'react-virtualized/dist/es/List',
  },
  ...rest
}

Then you can just import like so:

import List from 'react-virtualized/List';

// Now you can use <List {...props} />

You can also use a global-friendly UMD build:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="path-to-react-virtualized/styles.css" />
<script src="path-to-react-virtualized/dist/umd/react-virtualized.js"></script>

Now you're ready to start using the components. You can learn more about which components react-virtualized has to offer below.

Dependencies

React Virtualized has very few dependencies and most are managed by NPM automatically. However the following peer dependencies must be specified by your project in order to avoid version conflicts: react, react-dom. NPM will not automatically install these for you but it will show you a warning message with instructions on how to install them.

Pure Components

By default all react-virtualized components use shallowCompare to avoid re-rendering unless props or state has changed. This occasionally confuses users when a collection's data changes (eg ['a','b','c'] => ['d','e','f']) but props do not (eg array.length).

The solution to this is to let react-virtualized know that something external has changed. This can be done a couple of different ways.

Pass-thru props

The shallowCompare method will detect changes to any props, even if they aren't declared as propTypes. This means you can also pass through additional properties that affect cell rendering to ensure changes are detected. For example, if you're using List to render a list of items that may be re-sorted after initial render- react-virtualized would not normally detect the sort operation because none of the properties it deals with change. However you can pass through the additional sort property to trigger a re-render. For example:

<List {...listProps} sortBy={sortBy} />

Public methods

Grid and Collection components can be forcefully re-rendered using forceUpdate. For Table and List, you'll need to call forceUpdateGrid to ensure that the inner Grid is also updated. For MultiGrid, you'll need to call forceUpdateGrids to ensure that the inner Grids are updated.

Documentation

API documentation available here.

There are also a couple of how-to guides:

• Customizing classes and styles
• Displaying items in reverse order
• Using AutoSizer
• Creating an infinite-loading list
• Natural sort Table
• Sorting a Table by multiple columns

Examples

Examples for each component can be seen in the documentation.

Here are some online demos of each component:

• ArrowKeyStepper
• AutoSizer
• CellMeasurer
• Collection
• ColumnSizer
• Grid
• InfiniteLoader
• List
• Masonry
• MultiGrid
• ScrollSync
• Table
• WindowScroller

And here are some "recipe" type demos:

• Table with resizable (drag and drop) columns
• Collapsable tree view
• Full-page grid (spreadsheet)
• Dynamic cell measuring
• Cell hover effects

Supported Browsers

react-virtualized aims to support all evergreen browsers and recent mobile browsers for iOS and Android. IE 9+ is also supported (although IE 9 will require some user-defined, custom CSS since flexbox layout is not supported).

If you find a browser-specific problem, please report it along with a repro case. The easiest way to do this is probably by forking this Plunker.

Friends

Here are some great components built on top of react-virtualized:

• react-infinite-calendar: Infinite scrolling date-picker with localization, themes, keyboard support, and more
• react-sortable-hoc: Higher-order components to turn any list into an animated, touch-friendly, sortable list
• react-sortable-tree: Drag-and-drop sortable representation of hierarchical data
• react-virtualized-checkbox: Checkbox group component with virtualization for large number of options
• react-virtualized-select: Drop-down menu for React with windowing to support large numbers of options.
• react-virtualized-tree: A reactive tree component that aims to render large sets of tree structured data in an elegant and performant way
• react-timeline-9000: A calendar timeline component that is capable of displaying and interacting with a large number of items

Contributions

Use GitHub issues for requests.

I actively welcome pull requests; learn how to contribute.

Changelog

Changes are tracked in the changelog.

License

react-virtualized is available under the MIT License.