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Fun with Meteor, React, and React-Bootstrap

React-Bootstrap is pretty cool. I decided to play with it a bit.  Here are the basics.

In an already set up Meteor project (set up for React), it is added thus:

npm install --save react-bootstrap

Once this is done, you also need to add a bootstrap library. It could either be the twitter bootstrap meteor package, or you can link to it. For the purpose of my demo, I just grabbed a couple links from the React-Bootstrap site that they had handy for pulling in from a CMS:

index.html

<head>
    <!-- Latest compiled and minified CSS -->
    <link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/latest/css/bootstrap.min.css" 
          rel="stylesheet">
    </link>

    <!-- Optional theme -->
    <link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/latest/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css" 
          rel="stylesheet">
    </link>
</head>

Now, let's make a layout, and then create a component that we can render into it. We'll make it a modal, with a close button, and a "click me" button that will just add some text inside the modal. From this you can extrapolate how to make use of the framework.

Layout.jsx

import React from 'react';

export const Layout = ({content}) => (
  <div>
    <h1>My React App</h1>
    <hr />
    <div>{content}</div>
  </div>
);

And the component:

Mod.jsx

import React             from 'react';
import { Button, Modal } from 'react-bootstrap';

const handleClick = (event) => {
  event.preventDefault();
  document.querySelector('#foo').innerHTML="Yeah, I pushed it";
};

const handleHide = (event) => {
  event.preventDefault();
  document.querySelector('.static-modal').style.display='none';
}

export const Mod = () => (
  <div className="static-modal">
    <Modal.Dialog>
      <Modal.Header>
        <Modal.Title>Modal Title>
      </Modal.Header>

      <Modal.Body>
        One fine body...
        <p id="foo"></p>
      </Modal.Body>

      <Modal.Footer>
        <Button bsStyle="danger"  onClick={handleHide}>Close</Button>
        <Button bsStyle="primary" onClick={handleClick}>Click Me</Button>
      </Modal.Footer>

    </Modal.Dialog>
  </div>
);

And then just a route to show it:

router.js

import React       from 'react';
import { mount }   from 'react-mounter';
import { Layout }  from './Layout.jsx';
import { Mod.jsx } from './Mod.jsx';

FlowRouter.route("/", {
  action() {
    mount(Layout, {
      content: (<Mod />)
    });
  }
});

Let's talk about what we've got. I re-used/re-purposed some of the code my from last article, and, I modified the code the folks at React-Bootstrap demo on their site. The following will explain each of the code blocks above:

index.html is just to load in bootstrap css and theme from a Content Delivery Network.

Layout.jsx create's a container component that will hold our page content. It's just a div that accepts a component to render within itself.

Mod.jsx is our file of interest.
Note that React-Bootstrap exposes objects we can import and use. The two I'm using here are Button, and Modal. We need to import whatever objects we want to use. I only used two here, but look at their components documentation, there are a lot of goodies there to play with.

The next thing to know about React-Bootstrap components are that they have properties. The only property I used here was bsStyle, to get one each of a bootstrap danger, and success css class.

The click event handlers are just plain old Javascript. In the case of the Close Button, I simply grab the class of the Modal Component's parent, and hide it.  For the Click Me Button, I insert text into the paragraph element with id of "foo".  All very basic.  What is nice, is that using React, the mark-up and the code that it uses can be contained together.  Essentially, one file, one component.
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Location: Vancouver, WA 98660, USA

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