React Electron BrowserView

A simple wrapper of the Electron BrowserView element to allow it's magical props in React

This package is made to be a drop-in replacement for the react-electron-web-view package, allowing you to quickly replace web views with BrowserViews in your project.

ℹ️ This package uses Electron's addBrowserView to allow multiple Browser Views at once. This requires at least Electron >= 4.

Installation

npm install react-electron-browser-view
# or 
yarn add react-electron-browser-view

Example

An example application has been provided in example/. To run it, use yarn example from the source directory.

The example app uses most of this package's features so you might want to look there if anything is unclear.

Usage

The BrowserView element can be used in the same way you can use react-electron-web-view's webview element.

All events and methods on the BrowserView element are proxied. See #Events and #Methods below for more information.

You can find more information on available events and methods in the Electron docs

Usage:

import BrowserView from 'react-electron-browser-view';
// or
const BrowserView = require('react-electron-browser-view').default;
 
<BrowserView
  // Your source
  src="https://www.google.com"
 
  // Using events
  onDidAttach={() => {
    console.log("BrowserView attached");
  }}
  onUpdateTargetUrl={() => {
    console.log("Updated Target URL");
  }}
 
  // Providing styling for the container element
  style={{
    height: 200,
  }}
/>

This package will normally handle deleting views but sometimes - especially on reloads - react-electron-browser-view doesn't get unmounted correctly and leaves browser views behind.

This is why we recommend that you execute this package's removeViews function during your application start (e.g. in your index.js file):

import { removeViews } from 'react-electron-browser-view';
// or
const { removeViews } = require('react-electron-browser-view');
 
// Remove all previous BrowserViews
removeViews();

Properties

In addition to the documented Electron BrowserView properties we have a few extra ones

• className String - Sets the className of the wrapping div element.
• style Object - Sets the style of the wrapping div element. (see Notes below)
• muted Boolean - Sets the muted state of the webContents
• devtools Boolean - Activates devtools for the view. This will open the devTools inside the view itself - not the container
• update Any - Force position updates (see Notes below)
• trackposition Boolean - Constantly track the position of the element (see Notes below)
• ...webPreferences, see Notes below
• ...events, see Notes below

Behind the scenes

Behind the scenes this renders a div with the given size. It will then use use the position and size from this div to place the BrowserView right over it.

As opposed to WebViews, BrowserViews are not availible as normal HTML elements. This is why this package uses this method.

webPreferences

There are two different ways you can provide settings to the BrowserView's webPreferences:

1. Directly as a prop, e.g.

<BrowserView preload={path.join('./preload.js')} />

1. As an object: webpreferences can be provided using the webpreferences props. Please keep in mind that directly setting webpreferences props as seen above will overwrite the options given through this prop.

<BrowserView webpreferences={{
  preload: path.join('./preload.js'),
}} />

Events

This package will forward events fired by the BrowserView to your code. For a list of supported events, take a look at constants.js.

You can listen for events by adding a on[Event name camel cased] prop (e.g. onLoadCommit) to the component.

<BrowserView
  onDomReady={() => alert(1)}
  onWillNavigate={() => alert(2)}
/>

Methods

To use methods of the BrowserView, you'll have to keep a reference of the current component:

<BrowserView 
  ref={(webview) => {
    this.webview = webview;
  }}
/>

You can now use most BrowserView methods on this reference, e.g.

this.webview.goBack();

See constance.js for the list of supported methods.

Alternatively, you can get access to the original BrowserView instance via

this.webview.view

style

By default, the wrapping div element will have the following styles:

width: '100%',
height: '100%',
minHeight: 10,

These styles can be overwritten via the style prop.

"update" prop

Please always keep in mind that the BrowserView is only overlayed over your window. This package tries its best to keep the position and size of the view in sync but there may be certain limitations on this: Certain actions may not update the BrowserView element which thus cannot update the view correctly.

If you stumble upon such a case, please use the update props and pass any props that should trigger the view to relocate. The contents of this props are not actually used, but React will trigger the componentDidUpdate used for relocating the view nonetheless.

Example:

<BrowserView 
  update={this.state.username}
/>

This code will make sure that the BrowserView gets updated each time this.state.username is changed.

Animating the BrowserView

If you are trying to animate the view, e.g. using CSS transform with transition enabled, you will notice that the view doesn't update correctly. In this case the view only updates on the first frame of the animation and won't update after that. If you have to animate the view, please use the trackposition props. This will use JavaScript animation frames to track the position of the element even when the React element's props don't update.

Please avoid this prop if you don't absolutely need it and please don't use it on more than one BrowserView at a time as the loop can create performance problems otherwise.

trackposition can be dis- and enabled during the elements lifetime, so you can enable it during phases you use it and disable it otherwise.

Example:

<BrowserView 
  trackposition={this.state.isViewInAnimation}
/>

Development (src, lib and the build process)

The source code for the component is in src. A transpiled CommonJS version (generated with Babel) is available in lib for use with node.js, browserify and webpack.

This project uses webpack to build the library. To develop, please run yarn watch or yarn build from the root folder of the project.

react-electron-web-view

This package is based on and highly influences by react-electron-web-view.

License

MIT

Copyright (c) 2020 vantezzen.