React¶
Many JupyterLab APIs require Phosphor Widgets which have some additional features over native DOM elements, including:
- Resize events that propagate down the Widget hierarchy.
- Lifecycle events (
onBeforeDetach
,onAfterAttach
, etc.). - Both CSS-based and absolutely positioned layouts.
We support wrapping React components to turn them into Phosphor
widgets using the ReactWidget
class from @jupyterlab/apputils
:
Here we use the create
static method to transform a React element
into a Phosphor widget. Whenever the widget is mounted, the React
element will be rendered on the page.
If you need to handle other life cycle events on the Phosphor widget
or add other methods to it, you can subbclass ReactWidget
and
override the render
method to return a React element:
We use Phosphor Signals to represent
data that changes over time in JupyterLab.
To have your React element change in response to a signal event, use the UseSignal
component,
which implements the “render props”.
The running component
and the createSearchOverlay
function in the search overlay
use both of these features and serve as a good reference for best practices.
We currently do not have a way of embedding Phosphor widgets inside of React components. If you find yourself trying to do this, we would recommend either converting the Phosphor widget to a React component or using a Phosphor widget for the outer layer component.
We follow the React documentation and “React & Redux in TypeScript - Static Typing Guide” for best practices on using React in TypeScript.