pure-react-carousel

A highly impartial suite of React components that can be assembled by the consumer to create a carousel with almost no limits on DOM structure or CSS styles.

My goal was to create a 100% ReactJS carousel that doesn't try to impose structure or styles that need to be defeated in order to match your site's design standards. Are you tired of fighting some other developer's CSS or DOM structure? If so, this carousel is for you.

Carousels: Love them or hate them. However, if you are a React developer, and you have to use a carousel, why not use one that was...

• Developed from the ground-up in React.
• Is not a wrapper or port of some non-react carousel like Slick or Flickity.
• Fully supports touch events.
• Is aria compliant.
• Is responsive by default.
• Lets you assemble the carousel components in the DOM in any order you desire so long as they are all children of a single <CarouselProvider /> component.
• Lets you put any class names, properties, attributes, or styles on any of the components that you need.
• Supports ES6 and commonjs.
• Has 100% test coverage. Solid!

How To Use It.

Let's make a simple carousel with three slides, a next button, and a back button.

1. Add the module to your project.

npm i -S pure-react-carousel

2. Import only the required components into your project.

import React from 'react';
import { CarouselProvider, Slider, Slide, ButtonBack, ButtonNext } from 'pure-react-carousel';

3. Using Webpack or Rollup? Does your Webpack config have a loader for "css" files? If so, import the css as well.

import React from 'react';
import { CarouselProvider, Slider, Slide, ButtonBack, ButtonNext } from 'pure-react-carousel';
import 'pure-react-carousel/dist/react-carousel.es.css';

4. Put a CarouselProvider component in your code. This allows the other carousel components to communicate with each other. The only required properties are the orientation, naturalSlideWidth, and naturalSlideHeight. And it must have children, of course. We'll add children in the next step.

import React from 'react';
import { CarouselProvider, Slider, Slide, ButtonBack, ButtonNext } from 'pure-react-carousel';
import 'pure-react-carousel/dist/react-carousel.es.css';

export default class extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <CarouselProvider orientation="horizontal" naturalSlideWidth="100" naturalSlideHeight="125"></CarouselProvider>
    );
  }
}

5. Place the components in any order you wish as long as they are children of a single CarouselProvider component. Some components have ancestor/descendant relationships but they don't have to be direct relatives. For example: Slides need to go inside of a Slider. Slides require an index. Chances are, a lot of the time, you're going to be populating the slides from data and looping through the data, so it would be easy to add an index in your loop.

import React from 'react';
import { CarouselProvider, Slider, Slide, ButtonBack, ButtonNext } from 'pure-react-carousel';
import 'pure-react-carousel/dist/react-carousel.es.css';

export default class extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <CarouselProvider>
        <Slider>
          <Slide index={0}>I am the first Slide.</Slide>
          <Slide index={1}>I am the second Slide.</Slide>
          <Slide index={2}>I am the third Slide.</Slide>
        </Slider>
      </CarouselProvider>
    );
  }
}

6. Add some buttons so the user can navigate forward and backwards.

import React from 'react';
import { CarouselProvider, Slider, Slide, ButtonBack, ButtonNext } from 'pure-react-carousel';
import 'pure-react-carousel/dist/react-carousel.es.css';

export default class extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <CarouselProvider>
        <Slider>
          <Slide index={0}>I am the first Slide.</Slide>
          <Slide index={1}>I am the second Slide.</Slide>
          <Slide index={2}>I am the third Slide.</Slide>
        </Slider>
        <ButtonBack>Back</ButtonBack>
        <ButtonNext>Next</ButtonNext>
      </CarouselProvider>
    );
  }
}

7. Make sure to set the required properties for the <CarouselProvider> component.

import React from 'react';
import { CarouselProvider, Slider, Slide, ButtonBack, ButtonNext } from 'pure-react-carousel';
import 'pure-react-carousel/dist/react-carousel.es.css';

export default class extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <CarouselProvider
        naturalSlideWidth={100}
        naturalSlideHeight={125}
        totalSlides={3}
      >
        <Slider>
          <Slide index={0}>I am the first Slide.</Slide>
          <Slide index={1}>I am the second Slide.</Slide>
          <Slide index={2}>I am the third Slide.</Slide>
        </Slider>
        <ButtonBack>Back</ButtonBack>
        <ButtonNext>Next</ButtonNext>
      </CarouselProvider>
    );
  }
}

That's it. You have a super basic Carousel.

There are other components you can add, like ButtonFirst, ButtonLast, an Image component, and even an ImageWithZoom component that zooms on mouse hover or finger tap.

Obviously, you can customize the heck out of the layout. If you need to bury your Slider component in 18 parent divs, go for it. It will still do it's job. Feel free to add the className property to any of the Components to further customize your carousel. Or, hook into the many BEM named default CSS class names built into the carousel components.

Some components have a ancestor / descendant relationship but they don't have to be direct descendants of the parent. For example, Slide needs to be a descendant of Slider, but you can put a bunch of div wrappers around slide if you need to. A good analogy are the html tags table and tr. The tr tag needs to be a descendant of table, but it doesn't have to be a direct descendant. You can have a tbody between them in the tree.

Docs

A general note: You can append your own className to every single component in this library. Also, any props not consumed by a component are passed through to the root element of each component. This makes all the components in this library HIGHLY configurable. You can, for example, add your one event handlers, or change aria tags, etc.

<CarouselProvider />

**More about naturalSlideWidth and naturalSlideHeight The carousel is responsive and by default will flex to the full width of the <Slider > parent container. It's up to you to contain the carousel width via css. Each slide will be the same height to width ratio (intrinsic ratio). CarouselProvider needs to know the default size of each <Slide />. Note: you can make the carousel non-responsive by setting the width of <Slider >to a fixed css unit, like pixels. There are many other ways to make the carousel non-responsive.

<Slider />

A Slider is a viewport that masks slides. The Slider component must wrap one or more Slide components.

The Slide component creates the following pseudo HTML by default.

<div class="X" aria-live="polite" style="X" ...props>
  <div class="X" style="X">
    <div class="X" style="X" onTouchStart="X" onTouchMove="X" onTouchEnd="X">
      [content goes here]
    </div>
    <div></div><!-- Master Spinner -->
  </div>
</div>

<Slide />

The Slide component is a container with an intrinsic ratio computed by the CarouselProvider naturalSlideWidth and naturalSlideHeight properties. By default, only one slide is visible in the Slider at a time. You can change this by altering the visibleSlides property of the CarouselProvider. Slide components also contain a div that acts as an aria compliant focus ring when the Slide receives focus either by using a keyboard tab, mouse click, or touch.

The Slide component creates the following pseudo HTML by default.

<div tabIndex="X" aria-hidden="X" onFocus="X" onBlur="X" class="X" style="X" ...props>
  <div class="X">
    [content goes here]
    <div></div><!-- focus ring -->
  </div>
</div>

Note about the tag property If clicking on a carousel slide should do something like, oh, open a shadow box, or navigate to a page, You might want to set this to some other element, like an 'a' tag or even 'button'. Obviously, if you do this, you're going to have to add some more CSS styles. Look at the demo app (npm run dev) to see what CSS classes you can hook into. There are a lot. Don't forget, You can also supply your own className to append.

Dot

A Dot component is a HTML button. Dots directly correlate to slides. Currently visible slides cause the correlating Dot to become disabled. You can override the auto-disable feature by setting disabled to false (see table below)

DotGroup

A compound component that creates a bunch of Dot's automatically for you.

More Documentation to Come

I promise to add docs for every component. In the meantime, feel free to download and run the demo app. Looking at the code might help you out.

Dev Workflow

• npm run dev starts a local development server, opens the dev page with your default browser, and watches for changes via livereload
• npm run build compiles commonjs and ES modules and places them in the dist directory
• npm test runs jest (not configured yet)