Jhey Tompkins

Posted on Dec 17, 2019

React Portals in 3 Minutes

#react #javascript #webdev #beginners

Grasp this awesome API for escaping DOM restraints whilst creating Portals 🕹😎

What is it?

An API for rendering components outside of your app’s DOM hierarchy.

ReactDOM.createPortal(<Component/>, DOMElement)

Intuitive API 👍

For those in camp TL;DR scroll down for a demo!

Why?

Perfect for scenarios where CSS styles are restraining your elements. For example, stacking(z-index) and overflow issues. You could even render things in a new window! 😎

How?

Instead of returning an element in a component’s render method, return a portal.

const Outsider = () => ReactDom.createPortal(<div>I am outside</div>, document.body)

const App = () => <Outsider/>

Outsider renders as a direct descendant of document.body 👍

When to use?

Modals
Tooltips
Floating menus
Widgets

Scope + Bubbling

A brilliant thing about portals is that a component rendered in a portal acts as if it is still in the React tree. It behaves like a normal React child. Pass it props, it will react to updates, etc.

Events fired in a portal will also bubble up through the React tree! Check out the example in the React docs.

Basic example (Modal)

Let’s start with a common use case — the Modal. Modals are a great example of where we may need to render a component outside of the current DOM structure.

Our Modal will render based on a state value in the app.

const Modal = ({ children, onClose, open }) =>
  open
    ? ReactDOM.createPortal(
      <div className='modal'>
        <button className='modal__close' onClick={onClose}>&times;</button>
        { children }
      </div>,
      document.body
    )
  : null

For our example, we will render the Modal on document.body. Our Modal is a functional component that accepts children, onClose and open as props.

Here it is in action!

A silly example

Remember the video game "Portal"?

Let’s create a scene 😅

Let’s start with a Man 🏃. We are going to use Greensock's Draggable to create a draggable Man.

Now let’s create a scene with a "Portal". Our man will be bound by the app container.

const App = () => (
  <Fragment>
    <Man bounds={rootNode} />
    <div className="portal portal--in"/>
  </Fragment>
)

That gives us

Now let’s get ReactDOM.createPortal involved 😃

We add an element into the DOM outside of our app (#outside). We also create state for tracking whether our Man is in or out of the app container.

We then use createPortal to render a Portal in #outside. And if outside is true we will use createPortal to render our Man in that outer element 👍

<Man
  bounds={outside ? outsideElement : rootNode}
  onRelease={onRelease}
  outside={outside}
/>
<div className="portal portal--in" ref={innerPortalRef} />
{createPortal(
  <div ref={outerPortalRef} className="portal portal--out" />,
  outsideElement
)}

const ManRender = () => (
  <div className="man" ref={manRef} role="img">
    🏃
  </div>
);

return outside ? createPortal(<ManRender />, bounds) : <ManRender />;

Our Man now invokes an onRelease function too. This checks our cursor position against our portal bounds on release. If we release over a portal, we toggle the state value. All the code is in the demo, there's not much to it 👍

If you use your dev tools to inspect the DOM, you’ll see the render happening outside #app 👍

Notes

Don’t neglect Accessibility! Maintaining keyboard focus etc. is very important.
Available in React@16.0.0+

That’s it!

A 3-minute intro to portals in React!

As always, any questions or suggestions, please feel free to leave a response or tweet me 🐦! I'd love it if you connected with me on the socials 😎

Oldest comments (6)

Andrew Bloyce • Dec 17 '19

I am so glad you used an example from the portal game here. Perfect.

Jhey Tompkins • Dec 17 '19

I felt obliged 😅I'm glad it's appreciated!

joon • Dec 18 '19 • Edited

I read articles about using react portals, but never really felt the need to use it itself.... until now. Modals appear to be the perfect use-case, I've been giving far too high zIndexs to my modals :)

Thank you immensely for the post Jhey. It has truly widened my perspective on coding with React.