@mattbillfred/mgt-react

React wrapper for Microsoft Graph Toolkit

Use mgt-react to simplify usage of Microsoft Graph Toolkit (mgt) web components in React. The library wraps all mgt components and exports them as React components.

Installation

npm install @microsoft/mgt-react

or

yarn add @microsoft/mgt-react

Usage

All components are available via the npm package and are named using PascalCase. To use a component, first import it at the top:

import { Person } from '@microsoft/mgt-react';

You can now use Person anywhere in your JSX as a regular React component.

<Person personQuery="me" />

All properties and events map exactly as they are defined in the component documentation - see web component docs.

For example, you can set the personDetails property to an object:

const App = (props) => {
  const personDetails = {
    displayName: 'Bill Gates',
  };

  return <Person personDetails={personDetails}></Person>;
};

Or, register an event handler:

import { PeoplePicker, People } from '@microsoft/mgt-react';

const App = (props) => {
  const [people, setPeople] = useState([]);

  const handleSelectionChanged = (e) => {
    setPeople(e.target.selectedPeople);
  };

  return
    <div>
      <PeoplePicker selectionChanged={handleSelectionChanged} />
      Selected People: <People people={people} />
    </div>;
};

Templates

Most Microsoft Graph Toolkit components support templating and mgt-react allows you to leverage React for writing templates.

For example, to create a template to be used for rendering events in the mgt-agenda component, first define a component to be used for rendering an event:

import { MgtTemplateProps } from '@microsoft/mgt-react';

const MyEvent = (props: MgtTemplateProps) => {
  const { event } = props.dataContext;
  return <div>{event.subject}</div>;
};

Then use it as a child of the wrapped component and set the template prop to event

import { Agenda } from '@microsoft/mgt-react';

const App = (props) => {
  return <Agenda>
    <MyEvent template="event">
  </Agenda>
}

The template prop allows you to specify which template to overwrite. In this case, the MyEvent component will be repeated for every event, and the event object will be passed as part of the dataContext prop.

Why

If you've used web components in React, you know that proper interop between web components and React components requires a bit of extra work.

From https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/:

React passes all data to Custom Elements in the form of HTML attributes. For primitive data this is fine, but the system breaks down when passing rich data, like objects or arrays. In these instances you end up with stringified values like some-attr="[object Object]" which can't actually be used.

Because React implements its own synthetic event system, it cannot listen for DOM events coming from Custom Elements without the use of a workaround. Developers will need to reference their Custom Elements using a ref and manually attach event listeners with addEventListener. This makes working with Custom Elements cumbersome.