Creating custom React hooks to handle components external events

On a side project this weekend, I had the classic case for a modal implementation. In most of the applications you have to deal with daily, you come to a place where you have to confirm some action or review some changes before pushing the "I am 100% sure about this" button.

This is the perfect case for a modal, a small view that partially covers the screen and presents you with a few options. Most of the time, there will be a button to close the modal away by clicking on the "close" button on the top-right corner. But an even better way to let the user dismiss the modal is to let them click outside of the view in focus, without forcing them to hit the often too small "x" on top.

Here is the live implementation of our modal component we will build during this post. Try it out on our Codesandbox.

For cases like this, you must probably want to watch for clicks or taps outside the main view, in this case, the modal, so you can take the correct action of closing it. But how could you do that in React? one way would be to implement a global click handler in the component, something like this:

import React, { useRef, useEffect } from "react";

export default function Modal({onClose, ...props}) {
  const modalRef = useRef(null);

  useEffect(() => {

    const handleClick = (event) => {
      if (modalRef.current && !modalRef.current.contains(event.target)) {
        // Here you can close your modal.
        // how to close it, that is up to you
        // (e.g. removing components, changing routes)
        // in this case, I am calling a `onClose` function
        // passed down as a prop.
        console.log('Click happened outside. you can close now.')
        onClose()
      }
    }

    // Pointer events are more device agnostic
    // which are able to handle clicks on Desktops and Taps on mobile devices
    // See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/pointerdown_event
    document.addEventListener("pointerdown", handleClick)
    // Once our component unmount or update, we must remove the event listener
    return () => document.removeEventListener("pointerdown", handleClick)

    // Use the modalRef as dependency for the useEffect hook
    // so whenever this reference changes, the listener will update
  }, [modalRef])

  return (
    <div ref={modalRef} className="my-modal">
      <div className="modal-header">
        Super important Action
      </div>
      <div className="modal-body">
        This is an important message. read it carefully.
      </div>
      <div className="modal-footer">
        <button>Cancel</button>
        <button>Ok</button>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}

But this implementation leaves a lot of room for duplication isn't? If we need to handle a similar case on a different component, we will be doomed to repeat the same click away logic. We can do better than that by leveraging the power of custom React hooks.

Sharing logic with Custom React hooks

In my opinion, hooks are one of the most beautiful features in React. You can compose your components in such a way that gives your application superpowers. React itself leverages the power of hooks with useState, useEffect and a bunch of others.

But we are not limited to the hooks React offers, we can create our own hooks, enabling us to share logic in a very functional way across our app. Lets extract that click away logic from our previous modal component into a custom hook:

import { useEffect, useRef } from "react";

export function useClickAway(ref, onClickAway) {
  // Keep a mutable reference to click away callback
  // and change it every time the component using it changes
  // using 'useRef' here will make sure that we have a mutable
  // and single callback lying around.
  const callbackRef = useRef(onClickAway);
  useEffect(() => {
    callbackRef.current = onClickAway;
  }, [onClickAway]);

  // listen for click events on ref element
  // attaching a handler and calling the callback if necessary
  useEffect(() => {
    const onPointerDown = (event) => {
      if (ref.current && !ref.current.contains(event.target)) {
        callbackRef.current(event);
      }
    };
    document.addEventListener("pointerdown", onPointerDown);
    return () => {
      document.removeEventListener("pointerdown", onPointerDown);
    };
  }, [ref]);
}

lets break our custom hook down.

• We start by declaring a plain javascript function called useClickAway. This function takes two arguments. A ref which is a mutable reference to the component we want to watch for clicks "outside" of its boundaries. And a onClickAway callback, which will be executed once we detect a click outside.

• We created a ref for the useClickAway callback using the useRef hook. This will make sure that we have only one reference to our useClickAway callback that is captured by our useEffect calls we will use later.

• On our first useEffect call, we make sure to keep track of the useClickAway reference. So in case our component updates the useClickAway reference, we also have to update our internal reference inside our custom hook.

• On our second useEffect call, this where rubber hits the road. If you pay close attention, this call is exactly the same as we implemented in our modal component. The only difference is that we are calling our callbackRef reference for the onClickAway function instead. This is an extra layer of check to make sure that we are calling the right reference of the callback once a click happens outside of the view.

With that in place, how can we use that in our modal component? Lets see how the code looks like now:

import React, { useRef } from "react";
import { useClickAway } from "./useClickAway";

export default function Modal({ onClose }) {
  const modalRef = useRef(null);

  useClickAway(modalRef, () => {
    onClose();
  });

  return (
    <div className="shadow-overlay">
      <div ref={modalRef} className="my-modal">
        <div className="modal-header">Super important Action</div>
        <div className="modal-body">
          This is an important message. read it carefully.
        </div>
        <div className="modal-footer">
          <button onClick={onClose}>Cancel</button>
          <button>Ok</button>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}

Can you notice how clean our modal component looks now? Better yet, we can reuse that same logic across our app just by reusing the useClickAway hook. Isn't that cool?

Here is the link to the Codesandbox demo we built on this blogpost. Feel free to copy and use it on your apps.