get-element-size-or-position-with-onLayout.mo

Owner: Julien Nassar, Gaspard Denis

Control Points

• Hide your dynamically sized (or positioned) component with a style={{ opacity: 0 }} during the first rendering of your component to avoid glitches.

Motivation

If you need :

• to display a list of views without previous knowlegde of their size but want them to be all the same

• to know the size or position of an element on your screen dynamically (whithout explicitly describing it in the object's style)

To do this, React offers a onLayout props (see official docs) in which you can pass a callback that will be executed after the rendering of a component.

Prerequisites

A React-Native app. We will take here the example of a loading bar like this one :

Your goal is to calculate the number of green pixels rows you have to display for a given loading status from 0 (0%) to 1 (100%) without previous knowledge of the loader width :

import React from 'react';
import { View } from 'react-native';

export default class Display extends React.Component {
  render() {
    <View style={{flexDirection: 'row'}}>
      <View>
        {/* Some react component to display whatever */}
      </View>
      <LoadingBar status={0.33}/>
    </View>
  }
}

We do not know the size of LoadingBar component but we want to display a 33% progress in the LoadingBar.

Steps (~5 minutes)

First add a function to your LoadingBar component to get its width, and pass it in the onLayout props of your LoadingBar Component, and store it in your component's state :

import React from 'react';
import { View } from 'react-native';

export default class LoadingBar extends React.Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props)
    this.state = {
      loaderWidth: 0
    }
  }

  measureLoadingBar = ({nativeEvent}) => this.setState({ loaderWidth: nativeEvent.layout.width });

  render() {
    <View onLayout={this.measureLoadingBar}>
      {/* Here you want to display x% of your bar, x being the props 'status' passed by the component above */}
    </View>
  }
}

The onLayout will generate an event when the LoadingBar is displayed. You can access any layout info with :

const {posX, posY, width, height} = event.nativeEvent.layout

You can now compute the number of green pixels rows with the width we just got with onLayout :

const numbersOfGreenPixelsRows = this.props.status * this.state.loaderWidth