React - how to make left-side animated menu

Hey there! 👋 😊

In this post, I want to show you a left-side animated menu that I created recently.

Before we start, I would highly recommend you to check out runnable example for the solution on our website:
React - how to make left-side animated menu

Final effect:

Below I present you how to create this simple customized left-side menu that displays list of different kind of food 🍒🥦🍟 on click event.

In the solution, I've used a modern approach that involves the use of functional components and React hooks. In this case useState hook stores the state of my side menu if it's visible or not.

There is also some styling in the example, which I recommend you carefully analyze and change as you want. You can also modify the runnable example here and create your own left-side animated menu with no need to use any additional tools. 😊

Practical example:

import React from 'react';

const buttonStyle = {
  padding: '10px 20px',
  border: '2px solid #3085d6',
  borderRadius: '5px',
  background: '#3085d6',
  boxShadow: '5px 5px 5px grey',
  textShadow: '1px 1px 1px black',
  fontWeight: '900',
  color: 'white'
};

const commonStyle = {
  position: 'fixed',
  top: 0,
  bottom: 0,
  padding: '5px',
  border: '1px solid #0657FF',
  borderRadius: '0 30px 30px 0',
  background: '#C9E5FF',
  width: '280px',
  transition: '0.5s',
  overflow: 'hidden'
};

const visibleStyle = {
  ...commonStyle,
  left: '0'
};

const hiddenStyle = {
  ...commonStyle,
  left: '-300px'
};

const liStyle = {
  margin: '10px',
  padding: '5px',
  border: '2px solid #3085d6',
  borderRadius: '5px',
  background: '#5fa8ed',
  boxShadow: '5px 5px 5px grey',
  textShadow: '1px 1px 1px black',
  fontWeight: '900',
  color: 'white',
  listStyle: 'circle inside'
};

const App = () => {
  const [visible, setVisible] = React.useState(false);
  return (
    <div style={{ height: "200px" }}>
      <button style={buttonStyle} onClick={() => setVisible(true)}>
        Show
      </button>
      <div style={visible ? visibleStyle : hiddenStyle}>
        <button style={buttonStyle} onClick={() => setVisible(false)}>
          Hide
        </button>
        <div>
          <ul>
            <li style={liStyle}>Fruits 🍏🍌🍒</li>
            <li style={liStyle}>Vegetables 🥕🥦🍅</li>
            <li style={liStyle}>Fast Food 🍕🍟🍔</li>
          </ul>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
};

export default App;

You can run this example here

Leave a comment to let me know what you think! 😊💬

---

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Comments

[luks]

Nice and simple 😁
But there's something I don't understand: why the transition is working if the element is beeing render again when the state change? Maybe I'm missing something about how transitions work 🙄

[Dirask-React]

From the App function, only the 'recipe' for rendering a new component is returned.
The react mechanism detects the differences and updates only the things in the DOM tree that are finally changed between the render cycles.
In our case, it is only left style property value (from -300 to 0). It means that nothing else changes on the page in the DOM.

[Dirask-React]

The transition style property is always assigned to the DOM element (menu).

[Dirask-React]

To understand it better, go to developer tools, find the menu inspector, click to show/hide the menu and see what changes.

[luks]

Thanks for the excellent explanation :)

[Pawan Pawar]

Amazing!

[Orime]

Amazing! Thank you!