React Click Outside

Enhance a React component with a Higher Order Component that provides click outside detection.

Note: React 0.14 required for version >= 2.x. This assumes react and react-dom is installed in your project. Continue using version 1.x for React 0.13 support.

Note: Use version >= 2.3.0 to get rid of React.createClass warnings in React 15.5.

Usage

Installation:

npm install react-click-outside

Some component that you wish to enhance with click outside detection:

const createReactClass = require('create-react-class');
const enhanceWithClickOutside = require('react-click-outside');
const React = require('react');
 
const Dropdown = createReactClass({
  getInitialState() {
    return {
      isOpened: false,
    };
  },
 
  handleClickOutside() {
    this.toggle();
  },
 
  toggle() {
    this.setState({ isOpened: !this.state.isOpened });
  },
 
  render() {
    ...
  },
});
 
module.exports = enhanceWithClickOutside(Dropdown);

Note: There will be no error thrown if handleClickOutside is not implemented.

`wrappedRef` prop

Use the wrappedRef prop to get access to the wrapped component instance. For example:

// Inside a component's render method
<Dropdown
  wrappedRef={instance => { this.toggle = instance.toggle; }}
/>
 
// Now you can call toggle externally
this.toggle();

Details

The enhanceWithClickOutside function wraps the provided component in another component that registers a click handler on document for the event capturing phase. Using the event capturing phase prevents elements with a click handler that calls stopPropagation from cancelling the click event that would eventually trigger the component's handleClickOutside function.

Why not a mixin?

There are some mixins that provide click outside detection functionality, but they prevent the component from implementing the componentDidMount and componentWillUnmount life cycle hooks. I recommend not using a mixin for this case.

Limitations

IE9+ due to the usage of the event capturing phase.

Not working on iOS?

If the handleClickOutside handler is not firing on iOS, try adding the cursor: pointer css style to the <body> element. There are many ways to achieve this, here is just one example:

if ('ontouchstart' in document.documentElement) {
  document.body.style.cursor = 'pointer';
}

If your app already has a way for mobile detection (e.g. Modernizr), you may want to use that instead.

See issue #4 for a discussion.

License

MIT