redux-responsive

redux-responsive

A redux reducer for managing the responsive state of your application

Why Use Redux for Responsive Behavior?

redux-responsive does not require that you use React as your view library. However, since that is what we use, the explanation of our motivation mentions React.

There are many solutions for cleanly handling responsive designs in React applications. One common approach is to wrap a component in another component which is responsible for handling the behavior and passing the information down as a prop. While this at first seems good and the "react way", as the behavior gets more complicated, this quickly leads to a lot of boilerplate code in a single component. Also, depending on the implementation, it is possible that many copies of the responsive wrapper would create many different resize handlers.

Using redux not only reduces the overall noise in a component, but also guarantees that only a single event listener is waiting for resize.

Setup

First, add the reducer somewhere in your reducer tree. It's just a reducer so you can put it wherever you want! For example, you could put it in your top level call to combineReducers.

// reducer.js

import {combineReducers} from 'redux'
import {responsiveStateReducer} from 'redux-responsive'

export default combineReducers({
    browser: responsiveStateReducer,
})

Second, you must add the resize handlers to the window. To do this, simply pass your store to addResponsiveHandlers.

// store.js

import {createStore} from 'redux'
import {addResponsiveHandlers} from 'redux-responsive'
import reducer from './reducer'

const store = createStore(reducers)

// adds window resize event handler
addResponsiveHandlers(store)

export default store

Now your store is ready to use. The store's default breakpoints match common device sizes and are accessible by the following names in your view:

const defaultBreakpoints = {
    extraSmall: 480,
    small: 768,
    medium: 992,
    large: 1200,
}

Using Custom Breakpoints

You can also create your own reducer based on custom breakpoints:

// reducer.js

import {combineReducers} from 'redux'
import {createResponsiveStateReducer} from 'redux-responsive'

export default combineReducers({
    browser: createResponsiveStateReducer({
        extraSmall: 500,
        small: 700,
        medium: 1000,
        large: 1280,
        extraLarge: 1400,
    }),
})

The Responsive State

The responsiveStateReducer (and the reducer returned by createResponsiveStateReducer) adds an object with the following keys to the store:

• width: (number) The browser width.
• mediaType: (string) The largest breakpoint category that the browser satisfies.
• lessThan: (object) An object of booleans that indicate whether the browser is currently less than a particular breakpoint.
• greaterThan: (object) An object of booleans that indicate whether the browser is currently greater than a particular breakpoint.

For example, if you put the responsive state under the key browser (as is done in the examples above) then you can access the browser's width and current media type, and determine if the browser is wider than the medium breakpoint like so

// get the current state from the store
const state = store.getState()

// browser width (e.g. 1400)
state.browser.width
// browser media type (e.g. "large")
state.browser.mediaType
// true if browser width is greater than the "medium" breakpoint
state.browser.greaterThan.medium

Example Usage with React (and react-redux)

// MyComponent.js

import React from 'react'
import {connect} from 'react-redux'

// grab only the responsive state from the store
// (assuming you have put the `responsiveStateReducer` under
//  the key `browser` in your state tree)
function browserSelector({browser}) {
    return {browser}
}

@connect(browserSelector)
class MyComponent extends React.Component {
    render() {
        // grab the responsive state off of props
        const {browser} = this.props

        let message = `The viewport's current media type is: ${browser.mediaType}.`

        if (browser.lessThan.small) {
            message += 'Secret message for viewports smaller than than the "small" breakpoint!'
        } else if (browser.lessThan.medium) {
            message += 'Secret message for viewports between the "small" and "medium" breakpoints!'
        } else {
            message += 'Message for viewports greater than the "medium" breakpoint.'
        }

        return (
            <p>
                {message}
            </p>
        )
    }
}