What is react select? How do we use it? Features of React Select?

There will be times when you would find difficulty implementing things when working on certain aspects on a web project. Especially when you would be using normal components in react and UI/UX is of special concern to you. So, to solve this issue, you use select elements in react to make your work easier and build things for your web project.

React Select solves other issues like styling, fetching data from the remote source and focus. So how do we define React Select?

It is a component that provides you a whole different paradigm that involves healthy and powerful react components that are customizable at the same time. Let’s understand the approach to understand how the implementation works-

Features of React-Select

It has a comprehensive hold of UI components through API Injection Components. It has a well defined expressive emotion styling that works through an API.

It has highly controlled modular architecture and props. React- Select provides you to customize your layout and functionality by replacing the default components using the components property. These components have all the props facility and you can envision as per your creative desire. There are several components that are customizable as well as switchable. For example- Control, Group, Input, MenuPortal, MultiValue, Option, Placeholder, SelectContainer, SingleValue if we have to name a few.

Along with the aforementioned board and customizable features, it has a flexible data approach as well. It has functional components adaptability like animation, portal support with requests and group. It stands out specifically because of its highly adaptive qualities. It can easily integrate with its components and is adaptable or can be modified at the same time. Along with that, it provides diverse functional components like animation or request modules due to its flexible data approach.

## How are you going to use and install it?

Some of the prerequisites that are required- You need to be familiar with yarn or the node npm package module. Pre-install the react app tool One should have knowledge of these programming languages- HTML/CSS and JS (ES6) Along with that, a commanding-line terminal needs to be noted.

Now, to install a select component in your project- follow the command. Take note that it also depends upon the package module you end up using.

The below two mentioned commands will create a react app with all the modules. You can also observe the use of select components in the following as well.

$ yarn create react-app react

or 

 $ node npm create react-app

import React, { Component } from 'react'  
import Select from 'react-select'  

const options =   
[  
  { value: 'car', label: 'Car' },  
  { value: 'bike', label: 'Bike' },  
  { value: 'truck', label: 'Truck' }  
]  

const MyComponent = () => (  
  <Select options={options} />  
)

With the above mentioned code, you can access the react-select component from the respective yarn.

You can also involve styling components and customize it through the following snippet-

//App.js  

import React from 'react';  
import chroma from 'chroma-js';  

import { colourOptions } from '../data';  
import Select from 'react-select';  

const dota = (color = '#fff') => ({  
  alignItems: 'left',  
  display: 'flex',  

  ':before': {  
    backgroundColor: color,  
    borderRadius: 20,  
    content: '" "',  
    display: 'content',  
    marginRight: 4,  
    height: 20,  
    width: 10,  
  },  
});

In the above mentioned code, you can see the type of element which will get imported from the react module and the select will customize components depending upon the states and styles.

Lets see an example of an async component- it helps you define properties to the select component that comes with helper props, input change option and cache. It is easily implemented through the function callbacks and promises. It is also bootstrapped within the package.

import Async from 'react-select/lib/Async';  

import React, { Component } from 'react';  

import AsyncSelect from 'react-select/async';  
import { colourOptions } from '../data';  

type State = {  
  inputValue: string,  
};  

const filterColors = (inputValue: string) => {  
  return colourOptions.filter(i =>  
    i.label.toLowerCase().includes(inputValue.toLowerCase())  
  );  
};  

const loadOptions = (inputValue, callback) => {  
  setTimeout(() => {  
    callback(filterColors(inputValue));  
  }, 1000);  
};  

export default class WithCallbacks extends Component<*, State> {  
  state = { inputValue: '' };  
  handleInputChange = (newValue: string) => {  
    const inputValue = newValue.replace(/\W/g, '');  
    this.setState({ inputValue });  
    return inputValue;  
  };  
  render() {  
    return (  
      <div>  
        <pre>inputValue: "{this.state.inputValue}"</pre>  
        <AsyncSelect  
          cacheOptions  
          loadOptions={loadOptions}  
          defaultOptions  
          onInputChange={this.handleInputChange}  
        />  
      </div>  
    );  
  }  
}

Wrapping up- Through this article, you now know- what is React-Select, how it differs and what are its uses. How do you install it and extend its defined properties with customizable styles and changes. We discussed the features of REact-select and you need to keep it in mind that there are a whole lot of other concepts. However, this is a good start!

What is React Select?