React

With an application built using the create-react-app script the easiest way to include the component library is to call defineCustomElements() from the index.js file. Note that in this scenario applyPolyfills is needed if you are targeting Edge or IE11.

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import './index.css';
import App from './App';
import registerServiceWorker from './registerServiceWorker';

// test-component is the name of our made up Web Component that we have
// published to npm:
import { applyPolyfills, defineCustomElements } from 'test-components/loader';

ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'));
registerServiceWorker();

applyPolyfills().then(() => {
  defineCustomElements();
});

Following the steps above will enable your web components to be used in React, however there are some additional complexities that must also be considered. https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/ contains a synopsis of the current issues.

Properties and Events

The largest deficiencies that React currently has when it comes to working with standard HTML Custom Elements is that properties that contain non-scalar data (that is, data that is not a string or number) are not passed properly and custom events are not handled properly. The solution to both of these problems is to wrap the Custom Element in a React component, obtain a ref to the Custom Element, and use the ref in order to set the non-scalar properties and add event listeners via addEventListener. Here is an example showing how this works for the property passing:

import React, { useRef, useEffect } from 'react';
import { Forecast } from '../models';
import { iconPaths } from '../util';

const DailyForecast: React.FC<{ forecast: Forecast; scale: string }> = ({ forecast, scale }) => {
  const elementRef = useRef(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    (elementRef.current as any)!.iconPaths = iconPaths;
    (elementRef.current as any)!.forecasts = forecast;
  }, [forecast]);

  return <kws-daily-forecast scale={scale} ref={elementRef}></kws-daily-forecast>;
};

export default DailyForecast;

In this example, there are three properties: forecast is an array of objects, iconPaths is an object, and scale is a string. Since scale is a string it can be handled normally. However, the other two properties are non-scalar and must be set via the ref to the Custom Element. Wrapping the Custom Element as such prevents you from having to obtain a ref with every instance of kws-daily-forecast that you may need since you will instead be using the DailyForecast React component as such:

<DailyForecast scale={scale} forecast={f}></DailyForecast>

Bindings

Manually wrapping all Custom Elements in a React Component is a good practice, but it gets tedious quickly.

With bindings the web components get wrapped in a React component and then immediately become available as React Components. Some of the advantages of doing this are that you get types for your components. One of the main issues with React is that react does not propertly pass properties to web components. Out of the box React can only pass strings and numbers to components and it cannot listen to custom events. With the bindings the components appear as though they are React components and all properties get passed correctly including functions, objects, and arrays. The bindings also account for custom events by creating a prop called ‘on’. These allow React developers to interact with the web components as though they are React components.

Install

npm install @stencil/react-output-target --save-dev

Stencil Config setup

import { Config } from '@stencil/core';
import { reactOutputTarget } from '@stencil/react-output-target';

export const config: Config = {
  namespace: 'demo',
  outputTargets: [
    reactOutputTarget({
      componentCorePackage: 'component-library',
      proxiesFile: '../component-library-react/src/components.ts',
    }),
    {
      type: 'dist',
    },
  ],
};

componentCorePackage

This is the NPM package name of your core stencil package. In the case of Ionic we chose ‘@ionic/core’. This is the package that gets published that contains just your web components. This package is then used by the React package as a dependency

proxiesFile

This is the output file that gets generated by the outputTarget. This file should be referencing a different package location. In the example case we are choosing a sibling directory’s src directory. We will then create a React package that exports all components defined in this file.

Setup of React Component Library

There is an example component library package available on Github so that you can get started. This repo will likely live as a sibling to your Stencil component library. https://github.com/ionic-team/stencil-ds-react-template

Usage

import { DemoComponent } from 'component-library-react';