📦 React Modal Global

Open React modals Anywhere (including non-React Context) 🚀

Features

• 🌍 Can be used in useEffect hook or any other global scope
• 💧 Reactish - Open modals Modal.open(ModalComponent, { id: "2" }) as you would render components <ModalComponent id="2" />
• 🪢 Context - you can access params passed to open method in the modal component via useModalWindow hook
• 🔃 Queueing - you can open several modals at once
• ✅ Data preservation - data will persist after closing last modal and if same modal will be request to open, it will be restored
• 📚 Layouts - you can create your own layouts for each modal type (Dialog, Popup, Drawer).
• 🎛️ Customization - you can extend ModalController class and create your behavior
• 🦑 Forking - you can fork modals and create "layer depth"

Motivation

I was looking for a way to use modals in useEffect hook without using useState in each component and passing them to modal. I found a lot of packages with various features, but they all have some disadvantages:

• They are not global - you can't open them from anywhere (including non-react context)
• They are not context-aware - you can't access passed data from a component
• They are not queue-aware - you can't open several modals at once
• They are using "title, desc / header, body" pattern - which is not convenient

So I decided to create this package that would solve all these problems at once.

I was inspired by packages like react-toastify and react-modal.

Playgrounds

Title	Playground
Example of layouts usage
Example of usage with ChakraUI (by @laurensnl)

Usage

Please follow steps below to use this package in your project.

Create Modal

To start you need to create Modal. ModalController controls behaviour of the modals and is used in ModalContainer.

import { ModalController } from "react-modal-global"

export const Modal = new ModalController()

Add container

ModalContainer is a display container for modal components (it should be placed in the root), modal components will appear here as you open them.

import React from "react"
import ReactDOM from "react-dom"
import { ModalContainer } from "react-modal-global"

import Modal from "./Modal" // Your modal.

function App() {
  return (
    <>
      {/* ... Other components ... */}
      {/* It's better if `ModalContainer` goes after all other components */}
      <ModalContainer controller={Modal} />
    </>
  )
}

ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById("root"))

!!! STYLES !!!

Notice that you have to have styles to keep modal closed, otherwise modal will not work as expected.

You can write your own styles or use provided be the library by importing it

import "react-modal-global/styles/modal.scss" // Imports essential styles for `ModalContainer`.
import "react-modal-global/styles/layouts.scss" // Imports optional styles for `PopupLayout` and `DrawerLayout`.

Create new Modal component

Modal component is actually a React component. Note that this should be exactly component factory not an element.

React component

// Arrow function component
const ModalComponent = () => <>:3</>
// Plain function component
function ModalComponent() {
  return <>:3</>
}
// Class component
import { Component } from "react"
class ModalComponent extends Component {
  render() { return <>:3</> }
}

Using modal context

This allows a component to access modal window context inside it to see what props were passed in open method.

This also can be used to close modal window from inside (e.g. close on button click). Or you can listen to close event and run a cleanup function.

function ModalComponent() {
  const modal = useModalWindow() // Getting modal context of a modal window related to this component.

  return (
    <>
      <h2>Title</h2>
      <p>Content text</p>

      <button type="button" onClick={modal.close}>close</button>
    </>
  )
}

Advanced usage

Modal components can be templates for other modal components. See example here

Naming advice

Recommended naming is [Popup, Dialog or Modal] + [Name of a modal] => DialogPurchase.

Modal component usage

Open 'em

This is how you disaply your modal components

// Import default styles.
import "react-modal-global/styles/modal.scss"

import { Modal } from "react-modal-global"

import PopupLogin from "./PopupLogin"

function HomeView() {
  function showLoginPopup() {
    Modal.open(PopupLogin, { /* Probably your options? */ })
  }
  return (
    <>
      <h2>Title</h2>
      <p>Content text</p>

      <button type="button" onClick={showLoginPopup}>Show login popup</button>
    </>
  )
}

Open as it is

Although you can create your own layout (i.e. component) to pass title, description and other required/optional props. This library encourages using only component and its props to open modals as just how you would use it in a tree.

So instead of

Modal.open(PopupGeneral, {
  title: "Login",
  description: "Please login to continue"
})

Include them in the component itself. Of course you will need to create more components, but this is the way to go.

Modal.open(PopupLogin)

Or you can create types of your modal components and pass them to open method.

Modal.open(PopupAuth, {
  type: "login" // or "register"
})

Eventually, this is up to you to decide, it always depends on your case.

Modal layouts

To use various modal types (Dialog, Popup, Drawer), you create your own layout for each one, advised naming is [Type][Name] => DrawerLayout.

Take a look at this example

To create your first Popup modal try this

import { FormEvent } from "react"
import { useModalWindow } from "react-modal-global"

import PopupLayout from "../modal/layouts/PopupLayout/PopupLayout"

function PopupMyFirst() {
  const modal = useModalWindow()

  function onSubmit(event: FormEvent<HTMLFormElement>) {
    event.preventDefault()

    const target = event.currentTarget
    const ageInput = target.elements.namedItem("age")

    alert(ageInput) // Show age
    modal.close() // Then close `this modal`
  }
  return (
    <PopupLayout>
      <form onSubmit={onSubmit}>
        <h2>My first popup modal</h2>
        <input name="age" placeholder="Enter your `first popup modal` age" />
        <button type="submit">See my age</button>
      </form>
    </PopupLayout>
  )
}

export default PopupMyFirst

If using several containers

Instead of wrapping your modal components manually you can pass template attribute to ModalContainer, for example, PopupLayout

<ModalContainer controller={Modal} template={PopupLayout} />

Layout concept

Description

Layout is a component that wraps modal component and allows to customize modal look and controls (close button, header, footer, etc.).

Layouts are used to create various modal types (Dialog, Popup, Drawer) and to customize modal controls.

For example, you can create your own PopupLayout to use it in your Popup modals.

See example here

Aria

Layouts should not have aria-modal attribute and role="dialog" because they are already set in ModalContainer component.

You should manually add aria-labelledby and aria-describedby attributes to your layout.

Modal controller

Open

Modal.open is a method that opens a modal. See usage for example. See options for more details.

Modal.open(ModalComponent, { /* options */ })

Close

close

Modal.close is a method that closes a modal by its instance. This will only close one modal, since any duplicates are filtered.

Modal.close(ModalWindow)

closeByComponent

Modal.closeByComponent is a method that closes a modal by its component. It will close all modals that use this component.

Modal.closeByComponent(ModalComponent)

closeById

Modal.closeById is a method that closes a modal by its id. It will close all modals that have this id.

Modal.closeById("insane-id")

Since all modal ids are set to -1 by default, you can close all modals that don't have a custom id

Modal.closeById(-1)

Modal options

You can use options when opening a modal with Modal.open(). Available options

Option	Description
id	Specifies id of a modal. In react it's used as a key. May be used to find and close specific modal or else.
closable	Specifies if a modal closing is controllable internally. If false, it's supposed to mean that user should do a specific action to close.
label	Specifies aria-label.
layer	Specifies how modals should overlap.

Modal container

The ModalContainer component is a container for all modals, but it's not required to use it.

So if you're not happy with the default container, you can create your own.

It depends on ModalController and ModalContext to work.

Other features

Queueing

If you open a modal while another modal is already opened, it will be queued and will be opened after the previous one is closed.

Data preservation

Data will be restored if you open a modal with the same component and props after it was closed.

It also works with Modal.replace method, which can replace props with new ones while keeping the same component and data.

Layer depth

Sometimes you need to open a modal on top of another modal, for example, you have a modal with a login form, and you want to open another modal with a phone confirmation on top of it but keeping the login form visible and state preserved.

This is where layer depth comes in handy.

Modal.open(ModalComponent, {
  layer: 1 // Default is 0
})

Note that layer depth is not really a z-index, it's just a number that specifies the depth of a modal, it's used to determine which modal should be opened on top of another.

---

Please consider contributing to this feature, I will be happy to see your PRs or just a feedback.

Other modal ideas

There are more than one way to create modals in React.

Two the most popular are "React Tree Modal" and "Common Consumer Modal" (this is how I call it).

React Tree Modal

This is mostly known in React community, it's a modal that is rendered in a tree. There is a library called react-modal that implements this approach.

But this way has some problems, one of them is that you have to create a component, which will control your modal state (open, closed) every time for every modal, and it's not convenient.

Common Consumer Modal

This is an approach just consumes "title and description" or "header and body" props and renders them in a common container.

This approach lacks of flexibility, but it's easier to use. There also may be problems

• styling, because you can't style a modal component itself, you can only style a container
• multiple languages, because you can't apply its own translation to each modal window separately, you will have to pass it to a method, which is not convenient

Contribute

Needs feedback, please contribute to GitHub Issues or leave your message to the discord server.