react-transition-group

A fork, and "drop in" replacement for the original React TransitionGroup addons. Eventually this package can supercede the original addon, letting the React team focus on other stuff and giving these components a chance to get the attention they deserve out on their own. See: facebook/react#8125 for more context.

A ton of thanks to the React team, and contributors for writing and maintaining these components for so long!

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The TransitionGroup add-on component is a low-level API for animation, and CSSTransitionGroup is an add-on component for easily implementing basic CSS animations and transitions.

High-level API: CSSTransitionGroup

CSSTransitionGroup is a high-level API based on TransitionGroup and is an easy way to perform CSS transitions and animations when a React component enters or leaves the DOM. It's inspired by the excellent ng-animate library.

Importing

import CSSTransitionGroup from 'react-transition-group/CSSTransitionGroup' // ES6

var CSSTransitionGroup = require('react-transition-group/CSSTransitionGroup') // ES5 with npm

class TodoList extends React.Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
    this.state = {items: ['hello', 'world', 'click', 'me']};
    this.handleAdd = this.handleAdd.bind(this);
  }

  handleAdd() {
    const newItems = this.state.items.concat([
      prompt('Enter some text')
    ]);
    this.setState({items: newItems});
  }

  handleRemove(i) {
    let newItems = this.state.items.slice();
    newItems.splice(i, 1);
    this.setState({items: newItems});
  }

  render() {
    const items = this.state.items.map((item, i) => (
      <div key={item} onClick={() => this.handleRemove(i)}>
        {item}
      </div>
    ));

    return (
      <div>
        <button onClick={this.handleAdd}>Add Item</button>
        <CSSTransitionGroup
          transitionName="example"
          transitionEnterTimeout={500}
          transitionLeaveTimeout={300}>
          {items}
        </CSSTransitionGroup>
      </div>
    );
  }
}

Note:

You must provide the key attribute for all children of CSSTransitionGroup, even when only rendering a single item. This is how React will determine which children have entered, left, or stayed.

In this component, when a new item is added to CSSTransitionGroup it will get the example-enter CSS class and the example-enter-active CSS class added in the next tick. This is a convention based on the transitionName prop.

You can use these classes to trigger a CSS animation or transition. For example, try adding this CSS and adding a new list item:

.example-enter {
  opacity: 0.01;
}

.example-enter.example-enter-active {
  opacity: 1;
  transition: opacity 500ms ease-in;
}

.example-leave {
  opacity: 1;
}

.example-leave.example-leave-active {
  opacity: 0.01;
  transition: opacity 300ms ease-in;
}

You'll notice that animation durations need to be specified in both the CSS and the render method; this tells React when to remove the animation classes from the element and -- if it's leaving -- when to remove the element from the DOM.

Animate Initial Mounting

CSSTransitionGroup provides the optional prop transitionAppear, to add an extra transition phase at the initial mount of the component. There is generally no transition phase at the initial mount as the default value of transitionAppear is false. The following is an example which passes the prop transitionAppear with the value true.

render() {
  return (
    <CSSTransitionGroup
      transitionName="example"
      transitionAppear={true}
      transitionAppearTimeout={500}
      transitionEnter={false}
      transitionLeave={false}>
      <h1>Fading at Initial Mount</h1>
    </CSSTransitionGroup>
  );
}

During the initial mount CSSTransitionGroup will get the example-appear CSS class and the example-appear-active CSS class added in the next tick.

.example-appear {
  opacity: 0.01;
}

.example-appear.example-appear-active {
  opacity: 1;
  transition: opacity .5s ease-in;
}

At the initial mount, all children of the CSSTransitionGroup will appear but not enter. However, all children later added to an existing CSSTransitionGroup will enter but not appear.

Note:

The prop transitionAppear was added to CSSTransitionGroup in version 0.13. To maintain backwards compatibility, the default value is set to false.

However, the default values of transitionEnter and transitionLeave are true so you must specify transitionEnterTimeout and transitionLeaveTimeout by default. If you don't need either enter or leave animations, pass transitionEnter={false} or transitionLeave={false}.

Custom Classes

It is also possible to use custom class names for each of the steps in your transitions. Instead of passing a string into transitionName you can pass an object containing either the enter and leave class names, or an object containing the enter, enter-active, leave-active, and leave class names. If only the enter and leave classes are provided, the enter-active and leave-active classes will be determined by appending '-active' to the end of the class name. Here are two examples using custom classes:

// ...
<CSSTransitionGroup
  transitionName={ {
    enter: 'enter',
    enterActive: 'enterActive',
    leave: 'leave',
    leaveActive: 'leaveActive',
    appear: 'appear',
    appearActive: 'appearActive'
  } }>
  {item}
</CSSTransitionGroup>

<CSSTransitionGroup
  transitionName={ {
    enter: 'enter',
    leave: 'leave',
    appear: 'appear'
  } }>
  {item2}
</CSSTransitionGroup>
// ...

Animation Group Must Be Mounted To Work

In order for it to apply transitions to its children, the CSSTransitionGroup must already be mounted in the DOM or the prop transitionAppear must be set to true.

The example below would not work, because the CSSTransitionGroup is being mounted along with the new item, instead of the new item being mounted within it.

render() {
  const items = this.state.items.map((item, i) => (
    <div key={item} onClick={() => this.handleRemove(i)}>
      <CSSTransitionGroup transitionName="example">
        {item}
      </CSSTransitionGroup>
    </div>
  ));

  return (
    <div>
      <button onClick={this.handleAdd}>Add Item</button>
      {items}
    </div>
  );
}

Animating One or Zero Items

In the example above, we rendered a list of items into CSSTransitionGroup. However, the children of CSSTransitionGroup can also be one or zero items. This makes it possible to animate a single element entering or leaving. Similarly, you can animate a new element replacing the current element. For example, we can implement a simple image carousel like this:

import CSSTransitionGroup from 'react-transition-group/CSSTransitionGroup';

function ImageCarousel(props) {
  return (
    <div>
      <CSSTransitionGroup
        transitionName="carousel"
        transitionEnterTimeout={300}
        transitionLeaveTimeout={300}>
        <img src={props.imageSrc} key={props.imageSrc} />
      </CSSTransitionGroup>
    </div>
  );
}

Disabling Animations

You can disable animating enter or leave animations if you want. For example, sometimes you may want an enter animation and no leave animation, but CSSTransitionGroup waits for an animation to complete before removing your DOM node. You can add transitionEnter={false} or transitionLeave={false} props to CSSTransitionGroup to disable these animations.

Note:

When using CSSTransitionGroup, there's no way for your components to be notified when a transition has ended or to perform any more complex logic around animation. If you want more fine-grained control, you can use the lower-level TransitionGroup API which provides the hooks you need to do custom transitions.

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Low-level API: TransitionGroup

Importing

import TransitionGroup from 'react-transition-group/TransitionGroup' // ES6
var TransitionGroup = require('react-transition-group/TransitionGroup') // ES5 with npm

TransitionGroup is the basis for animations. When children are declaratively added or removed from it (as in the example above), special lifecycle hooks are called on them.

• componentWillAppear()
• componentDidAppear()
• componentWillEnter()
• componentDidEnter()
• componentWillLeave()
• componentDidLeave()

Rendering a Different Component

TransitionGroup renders as a span by default. You can change this behavior by providing a component prop. For example, here's how you would render a <ul>:

<TransitionGroup component="ul">
  {/* ... */}
</TransitionGroup>

Any additional, user-defined, properties will become properties of the rendered component. For example, here's how you would render a <ul> with CSS class:

<TransitionGroup component="ul" className="animated-list">
  {/* ... */}
</TransitionGroup>

Every DOM component that React can render is available for use. However, component does not need to be a DOM component. It can be any React component you want; even ones you've written yourself! Just write component={List} and your component will receive this.props.children.

Rendering a Single Child

People often use TransitionGroup to animate mounting and unmounting of a single child such as a collapsible panel. Normally TransitionGroup wraps all its children in a span (or a custom component as described above). This is because any React component has to return a single root element, and TransitionGroup is no exception to this rule.

However if you only need to render a single child inside TransitionGroup, you can completely avoid wrapping it in a <span> or any other DOM component. To do this, create a custom component that renders the first child passed to it directly:

function FirstChild(props) {
  const childrenArray = React.Children.toArray(props.children);
  return childrenArray[0] || null;
}

Now you can specify FirstChild as the component prop in <TransitionGroup> props and avoid any wrappers in the result DOM:

<TransitionGroup component={FirstChild}>
  {someCondition ? <MyComponent /> : null}
</TransitionGroup>

This only works when you are animating a single child in and out, such as a collapsible panel. This approach wouldn't work when animating multiple children or replacing the single child with another child, such as an image carousel. For an image carousel, while the current image is animating out, another image will animate in, so <TransitionGroup> needs to give them a common DOM parent. You can't avoid the wrapper for multiple children, but you can customize the wrapper with the component prop as described above.

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Reference

componentWillAppear()

componentWillAppear(callback)

This is called at the same time as componentDidMount() for components that are initially mounted in a TransitionGroup. It will block other animations from occurring until callback is called. It is only called on the initial render of a TransitionGroup.

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componentDidAppear()

componentDidAppear()

This is called after the callback function that was passed to componentWillAppear is called.

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componentWillEnter()

componentWillEnter(callback)

This is called at the same time as componentDidMount() for components added to an existing TransitionGroup. It will block other animations from occurring until callback is called. It will not be called on the initial render of a TransitionGroup.

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componentDidEnter()

componentDidEnter()

This is called after the callback function that was passed to componentWillEnter() is called.

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componentWillLeave()

componentWillLeave(callback)

This is called when the child has been removed from the TransitionGroup. Though the child has been removed, TransitionGroup will keep it in the DOM until callback is called.

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componentDidLeave()

componentDidLeave()

This is called when the willLeave callback is called (at the same time as componentWillUnmount()).

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A derivative of "Animation Add-Ons" by the React authors and contributors, used under CC BY.