FlexView

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

Install

yarn add 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

Demo

Here's a live playground

Documentation

Refer to the Book of FlexView

Supported browsers

We removed vendor prefixes in #66, since than we only supports browsers that don't require prefixes for flexbox CSS properties which are most browsers:

• IE 11
• Edge (any version)
• Google Chrome 29+
• Firefox 28+
• Safari 9+

If you need to support older browsers, try with FlexView 3.x.

Used By

At buildo we've been using FlexView in production in every web application we built since July 2015 (it was in a different repo back then).

As of today, FlexView has replaced the div as the brick of our projects and, thanks to it, our developers can finally build without too much trouble complex layouts that work the same on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 11.

You can see it in action here:

• buildo.io
• LexDo.it