Written by Alexander Solovyev✏️
In this article, we’re going to take a look at a real world application for React Portals and explain how it can be helpful for solving the overflow:hidden problem on a tooltip example.
This is a very common problem that arises all the time in web development: you want to build some tooltip or dropdown, but it’s cut by the parent element overflow: hidden styling:
In the screenshot above, the parent container with the overflow:hidden style is marked with red and the element that is used for positioning is marked with green.
CSS/HTML solution (with downsides)
The simplest way to solve this issue is by simply removing the overflow styling:
The tooltip is now fully visible and everything looks good, but it becomes a very fragile solution when any of the following scenarios arise:
- Somebody could accidentally add
overflow: hiddento the parent again (and forget to click your button with tooltip for testing!) - Somebody could add another parent wrapper around it, for example, to introduce some extra styling in some cases.
- There is also the possibility that
overflow: hiddenwas there for a reason, for example, to crop an image.
Here’s an example of an unwanted side effect of disabling overflow: hidden:
Before (image is inside the bounds of the card):
After (image has expanded far outside of the card marked with green):
React Portal in action
There’s a way to solve all the problems with tooltip/dropdown cut off by overflow for the entire application and reuse the code without needing to spend developer time on trying and testing.
The solution is to append tooltip or dropdown directly to the body of the document, set position: fixed style, and provide screenX and screenY coordinates where the tooltip/dropdown should appear.
Now, there are two things we need to do:
- Append the tooltip/dropdown to the body of the document outside of the React mount root
- Take coordinates for placing the tooltip/dropdown (for example, using
useRefReact hook)
Let’s start with mounting outside of React. That’s an easy task for a JQuery/Vanilla JS codebase, but it might sound challenging to a React developer because React applications usually have only one mount point to the DOM. For example, some div with id = "root".
Luckily, the React team introduced an additional way to mount components: React Portal.
Using React Portal, developers can access the tooltip/dropdown component from JSX in a convenient way: all of the props pass and handle events, but at the same time Portal is mounted to the body of the document outside of the React mount root.
The final JSX we are going to use is as follows:
<Portal>
<TooltipPopover coords={coords}>
Awesome content that will never be cut off again!
</TooltipPopover>
</Portal>
In the code snippet above, the <Portal /> wrapper component takes care of mounting outside of React and <TooltipPopover/> is placed according to the coordinates passed to it. The final look is as follows:
That’s it: a universal solution for any content that should pop up outside of the parent without being cut off. But the <Portal/> wrapper component is a “black box” for us, so let’s change that and look at what’s under the hood.
Building a Portal wrapper
By following React docs for Portal we can build our own custom <Portal/> wrapper component from scratch in a few steps:
Step 1: Adding an extra mount point in a DOM outside of “react-root”
<html>
<body>
<div id="react-root"></div> // [ 1 ]
<div id="portal-root"></div>
</body>
</html>
In this code snippet, I have named the React mount point element id "react-root", and all of the tooltips/dropdowns should be mounted using React Portal inside of "portal-root".
Step 2: Build a reusable Portal wrapper component using createPortal in React
Here is a simplified <Portal/> wrapper component code written with React Hooks:
import { useEffect } from "react";
import { createPortal } from "react-dom";
const Portal = ({children}) => {
const mount = document.getElementById("portal-root");
const el = document.createElement("div");
useEffect(() => {
mount.appendChild(el);
return () => mount.removeChild(el);
}, [el, mount]);
return createPortal(children, el)
};
export default Portal;
As you can see, mount needs a DOM element with id = "portal-root" from the previous code snippet with HTML to append an element inside. The core thing this wrapper component does is create a Portal for any React children passed into a component.
The useEffect React Hook is used here to take care of mounting the element at the right time and to clean up on component unmount.
Step 3: Passing button coordinates to the tooltip for positioning using React Hooks
The last thing we need to do to get the fully-functional tooltip component is pass button coordinates to the tooltip for positioning. That is not a hard task thanks to React Hooks, and it can be implemented with something like this:
const App = () => {
const [coords, setCoords] = useState({}); // takes current button coordinates
const [isOn, setOn] = useState(false); // toggles button visibility
return <Card style={{...styles.card, overflow: "hidden"}}> // [ 2 ]
<Button
onClick={e => {
const rect = e.target.getBoundingClientRect();
setCoords({
left: rect.x + rect.width / 2,
top: rect.y + window.scrollY
});
setOn(!isOn); // [ 3 ]
}}
>
Click me
</Button>
{
isOn &&
<Portal>
<TooltipPopover coords={coords}>
<div>Awesome content that is never cut off by its parent container!</div>
</TooltipPopover>
</Portal>
}
</Card>
}
In this code, the button component has an onClick event handler that takes current onscreen coordinates of the button from an e.target object using the standard getBoundingClientRect() method of a DOM element.
Additionally, a toggler for button visibility is in place that helps us to toggle the tooltip.
Please note that I left overflow: hidden intentionally on the Card component to showcase that the Portal solution is working fine.
Feel free to check the live demo and full code on codesandbox.
Bonus: prevent tooltips from “jumps” on page content change
There is one thing that refers to the tooltips positioning more than to Portals, but it’s worth mentioning: incase the button position depends on the right edge of the window (for example, display: flex; margin-left: auto styling), its positioning could be affected by the window scroll appearing (for example, when new content is loaded at the bottom of the page).
Let’s take a look at an example:
Before: window has no scroll and the tooltip is centered relative to the button.
After: window scroll has appeared, and the tooltip is a bit off center (exactly the same amount of pixels as the scroll added).
There are a few ways to solve this issue. You could use some resize detection package applied to the whole page like react-resize-detector, which will fire some event on content height change.
Then, we can measure the scroll width and correct the position of the tooltip.
Luckily, in our case, there is a much simpler pure CSS solution:
html {
overflow-x: hidden;
width: 100vw;
}
Adding this little code snippet to the page prevents the content of the page from unexpected “jumps” on window scroll appear/hide because the <html/> width is set to be equal to 100vw (window width), which is constant and unaffected by the window scroll.
Meanwhile, the 100% <html/> width doesn’t include the scroll, so the app doesn’t care anymore about the scroll being on or off. Tooltip will be centered all the time.
You can test the result on the demo https://xshnz.csb.app/ by playing with window height size.
Doing the same thing but with better-looking cross-browser scrollbars is also possible using a package called react-custom-scrollbars.
To make it work, you basically need to install the package and wrap the whole app into a Scrollbars component like this:
import { Scrollbars } from 'react-custom-scrollbars';
ReactDOM.render(
<Scrollbars style={{ width: "100vw", height: "100vh" }}>
<App />
</Scrollbars>,
document.getElementById("react-root")
);
Here is a quick preview (note the scrollbar appearance):
Conclusion
We have gone through the most common use case for React Portal step by step, explaining how it works on a real-life example with tooltip component development from scratch.
Of course, generalization can’t come without its tradeoffs. The complexity of Portal tooltip is bigger than the pure CSS/HTML solution, and it’s up to the developer to choose the right approach at the right time.
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