FlexView

A powerful React component to abstract over flexbox and create any layout on any browser.

Install

npm i --save react-flexview

Why

The flexbox API is powerful but far from being perfect.
The API is complex and there are still many inconsistencies between browsers that force developers to overuse vendor prefixes and literally do magic tricks to achieve the desired layout.

For these reasons, we asked ourselves: is there a way to simplify the API and handle any browser inconsistency in a single place? Our attempt to answer "yes!" to that question gave birth to FlexView.

// flex row
<FlexView />

// flex column
<FlexView column />

// grow, shrink and basis
<FlexView grow shrink basis={100} />
<FlexView grow={2} shrink={1} basis='auto' />
<FlexView basis={100} /> // shrink is set to `false` by default so you're certain to a have it `100px` wide/tall

// wrap
<FlexView wrap />

Remember how difficult it was to center a div inside another div?
flexbox definitely improved it, but still having to switch from align-items to justify-content based on flex-direction of the parent is confusing and error prone.

FlexView lets you align and center children with two intuitive props: vAlignContent and hAlignContent.

<FlexView hAlignContent='center' vAlignContent='center'>
  <FlexView>the center of the Earth</FlexView>
</FlexView>

How to use

In your component:

import React from 'react';
import FlexView from 'react-flexview';

export default class Component extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <FlexView vAlignContent='center'>
        I'm vertically centered!
      </FlexView>
    );
  }
}

Props

Name Type Default Description
children ReactChildren required. FlexView content
column Boolean optional. Flex-direction: column
vAlignContent enum("top" | "center" | "bottom") optional. Align content vertically
hAlignContent enum("left" | "center" | "right") optional. Align content horizontally
marginLeft union(String | Number) optional. Margin-left property ("auto" to align self right)
marginTop union(String | Number) optional. Margin-top property ("auto" to align self bottom)
marginRight union(String | Number) optional. Margin-right property ("auto" to align self left)
marginBottom union(String | Number) optional. Margin-bottom property ("auto" to align self top)
grow union(Boolean | Number) optional. Property (for parent primary axis)
shrink union(Boolean | Number) optional. Flex-shrink property
basis union(String | Number) optional. Flex-basis property
wrap Boolean optional. Wrap content
height union(String | Number) optional. Height property (for parent secondary axis)
width union(String | Number) optional. Width property (for parent secondary axis)
className String optional. Additional className for wrapper element
style Object optional. Inline-style overrides for wrapper element

GitHub