npm i react-call

Features

Bring your React component, react-call gives you the call(<props>) method.

• 🔰 Easy to use
• ⛑️ Fully Type-Safe
• ⚡️ Causes no renders at all
• 🛜 Setup once, call from anywhere
• ⛓️‍💥 Not limited by a context provider
• 🤯 Call from outside React
• 🌀 Flexible: it's your component
• 🚀 Supports React Native and SSR
• 📦 Extremely lightweight: ~500B
• 🕳️ Zero dependencies

The pattern

Imperatively call your React component the way window.confirm() calls a confirmation dialog.

Use cases

Present a piece of UI to the user, wait for it to be used and get the response data.

• ✅ Confirmations, dialogs
• ✅ Notifications, toasts
• ✅ Popup forms, modals
• ✅ Or anything! 🦄 Build your thing

Usage

//        ↙ response             props ↘
const accepted = await Confirm.call({ message: 'Continue?' })

[!NOTE] A confirmation dialog is used as an example, but any component can become callable. Plus you can create as many as you wish.

Setup

1. ⚛️ Wrap your component

import { createCallable } from 'react-call'

interface Props { message: string }
type Response = boolean

export const Confirm = createCallable<Props, Response>(({ call, message }) => (
  <div role="dialog">
    <p>{message}</p>
    <button onClick={() => call.end(true)}>Yes</button>
    <button onClick={() => call.end(false)}>No</button>
  </div>
))

Apart from your props, a special call prop is received containing the end() method, which will finish the call returning the given response.

[!TIP] Since it's just a component, state, hooks and any other React features are totally fine. You could have inputs, checkboxes, etc, bind them to a state and return such data via end() method.

2. 📡 Place the Root

Place Root once, which is what listens to every single call and renders it. Any component that is visible when making your calls will do.

+ <Confirm.Root />
//  ^-- it will only render active calls

[!IMPORTANT] If more than one call is active, they will render one after the other (newer below, which is one on top of the other if your CSS is position fixed/absolute). It works as a call stack.

[!WARNING] Since it's the source of truth, there can only be one Root mounted per createCallable(). Avoid placing it in multiple locations of the React Tree loaded at once, an error will be thrown if so.

Passing Root props

You can also read props from Root, which are separate from the call props. To do that, just add your RootProps type to createCallable and pass them to your Root.

Root props will be available to your component via call.root object.

+ type RootProps = { userName: string }

export const Confirm = createCallable<
  Props,
  Response,
+ RootProps
>(({ call, message }) => (
  ...
+   Hi {call.root.userName}!
  ...
))

<Confirm.Root
+ userName='John Doe'
/>

You may want to use Root props if you need to:

• Share the same piece of data to every call
• Use something that is availble in Root's parent
• Update your active call components on data changes

Exit animations

To animate the exit of your component when call.end() is run, just pass the duration of your animation in milliseconds to createCallable as a second argument:

+ const UNMOUNTING_DELAY = 500

export const Confirm = createCallable<Props, Response>(
  ({ call }) => (
    <div
+     className={call.ended ? 'exit-animation' : '' }
    />
  ),
+ UNMOUNTING_DELAY
)

The call.ended boolean may be used to apply your animation CSS class.

🦄 Build your thing

Again, this is no way limited to confirmation dialogs. You can build anything!

For example, because of the nature of the call stack inside and its ability to display multiple calls at once, a particularly interesting use case is notifications, toasts or similar. You could end up with something like:

const userAction = await Toast.call({
  message: 'This is a toast',
  duration: 5000,
  type: 'success',
})

But it's just another idea. It all depends on what you're building. The only thing react-call does is let you call components imperatively ⚛️ 📡

TypeScript types

You won't need them most likely, but if you want to split the component declaration and such, you may use the types under the ReactCall namespace:

import type { ReactCall } from 'react-call'

Errors

SSR

✅ The react-call setup supports Server Side Rendering. This means both createCallable and Root component are fine if run or rendered on the server.

However, bear in mind that because the call() method is meant to be triggered by user interaction, it is designed as a client-only feature.

[!CAUTION] If call() is run on the server a "No \ found!" error will be thrown. As long as you don't run the call() method on the server you'll be fine.