react-flip-toolkit

Comparison with other React FLIP libraries

Feature	react-flip-move	react-overdrive	react-flip-toolkit
Animate position	✅	✅	✅
Animate size	❌	✅	✅
Animate opacity	❌	✅	✅
Animate parent's size without warping children	❌	❌	✅
Use real FLIP instead of cloning & crossfading	✅	❌	✅
Enable nested animations	❌	❌	✅
Easy to set up & beginner-friendly	✅	✅	🤷

Demos

• Simplest possible example
• Guitar shop
• Absurd, overly complex, nested example
• React-flip-toolkit logo

What is FLIP?

If you need a refresher, here's an article by the person who created FLIP: Flip Your Animations

Quick start

npm install react-flip-toolkit

import { Flipper, Flipped } from 'react-flip-toolkit'

Wrap your container element with a Flipper component that has a flipKey prop that changes every time an animation should happen.

Wrap elements that should be animated with Flipped components that have flipId props matching them across renders.

Simplest example: Tweening a single element

(click to view on codepen)

More useful but slightly less simple: Transitioning two elements

The power of FLIP lies in smoothly tweening two completely separate elements to appear as if they are one:

The Components

1. Flipper component

The parent wrapper component that contains all the elements to be animated:

<Flipper flipKey={someKeyThatChanges}>
  {/* children wrapped in Flipped components*/}
</Flipper>

prop	default	type	details
flipKey (required)		string, number, bool	Changing this tells react-flip-toolkit to transition child elements wrapped in Flipped components.
children (required)		node	One or more element children
ease	easeOutExpo	string	Set the default easing for all FLIP transitions: Interactive explorer for all easing options
duration	250	number	Default duration in ms for all FLIP transitions
applyTransformOrigin	true	bool	Whether or not react-flip-toolkit should apply a transform-origin of "0 0" to animating children (this is generally desirable for FLIP animations)

2. Flipped component

A component that wraps an element that needs to be animated.

E.g. in one component you can have

<Flipped flipId="coolDiv">
  <div className="small" />
</Flipped>

and in another component somewhere else you can have

<Flipped flipId="coolDiv">
  <div className="big" />
</Flipped>

and they will be tweened by react-flip-toolkit.

prop	default	type	details
children (required)		node	Wrap a single child with the Flipped component. If the child is a React component, make sure it passes down unknown props directly to the rendered DOM element so that Flipped can pass down the necessary data-* attributes.
flipId (required)		string	Use this to tell react-flip-toolkit how elements should be matched across renders so they can be animated.
inverseFlipId		string	Refer to the id of the parent Flipped container whose transform you want to cancel out. Read more about canceling out parent transforms here
transformOrigin	"0 0"	string	This is a convenience method to apply the proper CSS transform-origin to the element being FLIP-ped. This will override react-flip-toolkit's default application of transform-origin: 0 0 if it is provided as a prop.
ease	easeOutExpo	string	This string should refer to one of the available easing options). This prop will override the easing specified in the parent Flipped component.
duration	250	number	Timing for the individual FLIP transition, this will override the one specified in the parent Flipped component
delay	0	number	Amount of time to wait before tweening the element position.
onAppear(element, index)		func	Called when the element first appears. It is provided a reference to the DOM element being transitioned as the first argument, and the index of the element relative to all appearing elements as the second.
onStart(element)		func	Called when the FLIP animation starts. It is provided a reference to the DOM element being transitioned as the first argument
onComplete(element)		func	Called when the FLIP animation completes. It is provided a reference to the DOM element being transitioned as the first argument. (If transitions are interruped by new ones, onComplete will still be called.)

By default the FLIP-ped elements' translate, scale, and opacity properties are all transformed. However, certain effects require more control so if you specify any of these props, only the specified attribute(s) will be tweened:

prop	type	details
translate	bool	Tween translateX and translateY
scale	bool	Tween scaleX and scaleY
opacity	bool

Advanced and usually unnecessary:

prop	type	details
componentId	string	Unique identifier for the component
componentIdFilter	array,string	Only apply FLIP transitions if the transition originates or ends with a component with the specified componentId. To limit the application of an inverse transform, you refer to the parent's componentId as seen in this example.

Scale transitions made eas(ier)

Try it out on Codepen:

Some other FLIP libraries just allow you to animate position changes, but things get a lot more interesting once you can animate scale changes as well.

The problem with scale animations has to do with children -- if you scale a div up 2x, you will warp any children it has by scaling them up too, creating a weird-looking animation. That's why this library allows you to wrap the child with a Flipped component that has an inverseFlipId to counteract the transforms of the parent:

<Flipped flipId={parentFlipId}>
  <div>
    <Flipped inverseFlipId={parentFlipId} scale>
      <div>some text that will not be warped</div>
    </Flipped>
  </div>
</Flipped>

By default, not only the scale of the parent will be counteracted, but also the translations (this allows children components to make their own FLIP animations without being affected by the parent). But for many/most use cases, you'll want to additionally specify the scale prop to limit the adjustment to the scale and allow the positioning to move with the parent.

Other details

• ~7.6kb minified and gzipped
• React 16+
• Tested in latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, with acceptable performance in IE 11

FAQ

• Why isn't anything animating? Make sure you're updating the flipKey attribute in the Flipper component whenever an animation should happen.

• Why does my animation look "off"? Try increasing the duration to something ridiculous like 10000 so that you can catch every detail. When the animations happen quickly it's hard to consciously spot little issues that can interfere with the final effect.

• Why is the element animating from or to an unexpected position? At any point, there can only be one element with a specified flipId on the page. If there are multiple Flipped elements on the page with the same id, things will start to get weird. Check to make sure all flipIds are unique.