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react_paper

Google's Polymer Paper Elements in React

Whereby I beat React over the head in order to get Polymer's Paper Element Web Component project to work.

Gotchas

Its worth noting that this is probably not a great idea and should be considered an experiment in React and Web Components. If you use this in production, you are a daring soul and I salute your #yolo-ness.

Change Events

React handles native change events in a special way in order to maintain cross-browser compatilibty/IE8. Because of this, the Paper "change" events for <paper-checkbox>, <paper-radio-button>, <paper-slider>, and <paper-toggle-button> can be bound with onPaperChange

For example:

<paper-toggle-button onPaperChange={this.onChange}/>

Event Details

Certain Paper Elements expose custom properties to the event object that are passed to event handlers. For example, <paper-dropdown> has a "core-change" event that supports a isSelected property/method.

This has not yet been implemented.

The selected Attribute

The selected attribute is defined as a boolean attribute in both the W3C HTML5 spec and within React itself. Unfortunately, Paper overloads this attribute in <paper-dropdown> to be an Object that allows the use of any attribute of its child node as specified in the valueattr attribute.

In order to work around this, the selected attribute has been renamed to selectedName (borrowing from React's class::className pattern)

For example:

<paper-dropdown selectedName="Financier" valueattr="label">
  <paper-item label="Croissant"></paper-item>
  <paper-item label="Donut"></paper-item>
  <paper-item label="Financier"></paper-item>
  <paper-item label="Madeleine"></paper-item>
</paper-dropdown>

The error Attribute

Paper allows the <paper-input> element to specify an error attribute where it is defined as a boolean, whose presence indicates that a default message should be used, or as a string, whose presence indicates an explicit error message to use.

React does not provide the ability to specify both a boolean and a string value when defining DOM properties, so errorName is used for explicit values:

<paper-input label="Generic Error" required error/>
<paper-input label="Explicit Error" required error="ZOMG! You fail."/>

JSX Compatiblity

All of the top-level Paper Elements have been added to JSX and to the list of known React DOM elements.

Polymer Core elements and Paper Base Classes HAVE NOT been added.

In order to keep the scope of this module low, I decided to only implement the high-level web components. In the future, it may make sense to add more or even allow any arbitrary component, attribute, or event to be injected. But it is probably best to wait to see how the Facebook team addresses Web Component interoperability.

Must use Browserify

This module requires a fair amount of monkey patching React. Additionally, React, internally, has a certain boot order that takes place. Meaning that certain features are not patchable or injectable after their modules have been required and loaded. Because of this, I don't think its possible to include the distributable React package and still have any of this work.

Realistically, you can use any package manager you'd like, as long as its compatible with CommonJS require methods.

React Version Lock-in

As stated previously, the mere execution of this idea depends on lots of monkey patching of React and some duplication of internal, private methods. Because of this, I cannot guarantee that this will work above the currently indicated peerDependency specified in package.json.

Project Tests

Pull Requests welcome! 😉

Installation

npm install react_paper --save

How to Use

Require this module before you require React in any of your top-level modules:

// In app/assets/javascripts/app.jsx
require('react_paper');
var React = require('react');

var App = React.createClass({
  ...
});

...

Event Binding

All Paper and Core events can be bound to by camelcasing the event name:

For example, to bind to "core-overlay-open":

<paper-dialog onCoreOverlayOpen={this.onOpen}/>

NOTE: See also the "change events" gotcha above.

Component Methods

All Paper element component methods have been added to the core React DOM elements:

var Widget = React.createClass({
  openDialog: function() {
    this.refs.dialog.toggle(); // The Dialog's toggle method can be called directly
  },
  render: function() {
    return (
      <paper-dialog ref="dialog" heading="Title">
        <p>Lorem ipsum ....</p>
        <paper-button label="Accept" affirmative autofocus></paper-button>
      </paper-dialog>

      <paper-button label="Open Dialog" raisedButton onClick={this.openDialog}/>
    );
  }
});

JSX

All top-level Paper Elements can be used in JSX.

You must use the Browserify transform polymerize included in this package in place of reactify.

For example:

browserify -t react_paper/lib/polymerize ./my_app.jsx > ./my_app-bundle.js

NOTE: See also the "JSX" gotcha above