react-defer-renderer

Render components asynchronously and non blocking

What is this ?

react-defer-renderer provides utilities that helps you defer the render of some components after the natural render. It is only 1.76 KB gripped.

During the first render, or the render of a complex tree, you may want to unblock the main thread and release it so that the most important parts of the app are rendered and painted first, the user may then navigate and abort the painting of a huge tree that is being rendered.

Concrete examples:

• Rendering the menu and/or side bars of the app first.
• Rendering the Tab headers and delay the actual content.
• When pressing on a Tab, if its content contains for example 10000 html tags, the touch ripple along with the tab content will feel laggy and the user will be unable to work on the app until the render of the whole tree is done

This package provides a High Order Component called withDeferRender and it is responsible about deferring your component. And a Context Provider called DeferRenderProvider which is optional and is used if you want to manage a bunch of deferred components.

I tried to comment almost each expression of code for people looking to read the source code.

Demo

This ongoing codeSandbox will contain reusable examples

How it works

1. The standalone mode: This means, each of your components is working independently out of context. Technically, in the first render, we render nothing or a fallback that can be used as a placeholder. and then we request an animation frame from the browser, when granted, we render the component.

2. The context mode: This means that a lot of your components' deferring is managed by a context. This mode works like the standalone, except that there are a lot of components managed by the context, so they all obey the current deferring mode.

Use cases

• Drastically reduce user's time to interaction when the tree is relatively huge
• Pause and resume render on-demand
• Defer the render of invisible tabs
• Defer render of trees outside the viewport
• When a list is huge/complex and you have to paint it entirely (ie: more than 20000 html tags in total), the first render may feel laggy and the user won't be able to interact with some elements until the whole work is done
• The pause and resume feature could be used to easily manage a deferred infiniteScroll list

Usage and props

Using the HOC

The hoc just wraps your initial component.

import { withDeferRender } from 'react-defer-renderer'
 
// WrappedComponent: a React Component
// config: an object accepting only `fallback` property that is a React element
const DeferredComponent = withDeferRender(WrappedComponent, config);

Using the Provider

The Provider, like any react context provider, needs to be in the right place wrapping your tree

import { DeferRenderProvider } from 'react-defer-renderer'
 
<DeferRenderProvider delay={10} batchSize={5} mode="sync">
  <AppTreeThatContainsSomeDeferredComponents />
</DeferRenderProvider>
 

Prop	PropType	Default value	Usage
mode	oneOf(['sync', sequential', 'async-concurrent])	sequential	Represents the context deferring mode
delay	number	0	The delay in ms after which the component is granted the render
batchSize	number	deferred components count	In sync and async-concurrent modes, it batches renders

Context Deferring Modes

1. sync: The sync mode will grant the render to the batchSize components and are painted synchronously at the same time.

2. sequential: The sequential mode will render component after component following the order of subscription.

3. async-concurrent: The sync mode will grant the render to the batchSize components with an asynchronous behavior, the paint order will managed by react internals.

TODO and road-map

1. Write a lot of tests for the project. I have not wrote them yet because I had just the idea that was complex at first, and I still do not have a complete overview of how the complete version of the product will look like.
2. Exclude register, next and cleanUp from DeferContext, because they are meant for internal use.
3. When pausing a work that has been granted but the delay has not being resolved yet, the work should be interrupted immediately.
4. Support props resolve to defer the render of a component until some props has same exact values.
5. Support Promise resolve to defer the render until a promise resolves.

Run locally

1. clone the project: git clone https://github.com/incepter/react-defer-render.git.
2. install dependencies: yarn.
3. start the package: yarn start.
4. start the example: cd exemple and then yarn start.

Contribution guide

1. Fork the project
2. Add your new branch git checkout -b feat/new-feature-name
3. Submit a pull request

Other examples

 
import LongTabContentForm from './path'
import { withDeferRender } from 'react-defer-renderer'
 
const DeferredComponent = withDeferRender(LongTabContentForm)
const DeferredComponent = withDeferRender(LongTabContentForm, { fallback: <Spinner /> })
 
// ...
 
<DeferredComponent />

---

 
import MyComponent from './path'
import { DeferRenderProvider } from 'react-defer-renderer'
 
// ...
 
<DeferRenderProvider >
  // <App />
  // <Section />
  // <SideBar />
</DeferRenderProvider>
 
<DeferRenderProvider
  delay={20}
  batchSize={20}
  mode="async-concurrent|sync|sequential"
  >
  <App />
  <Section />
  <SideBar />
</DeferRenderProvider>

More on provider

The defer provider puts in context value the following functions:

Function	Should be used ?	args	Usage
register	NO	A callback	Registers a callback to be called after the animation granted is called depending from the deferring mode. returns the internal id of the work
cleanUp	NO	work id	takes the work id, interrupts it and then removes it
next	NO	N/A	will inform the provider to pass to the next deferred work (depends highly from the internal work status and the deferred mode)
pause	YES	N/A	Will set the provider work status to paused, so it will stop granting the render for other components
resume	YES	N/A	Will ask the provider to resume the rendering work

import { DeferContext } from 'react-defer-renderer'
 
function Commander() {
  const { pause, resume } = React.useContext(DeferContext)
  return (
    <div>
      <Button onClick={pause}>pause</Button>
      <Button onClick={resume}>resume</Button>
    </div>
  )
}

License

MIT © incepter