Comparison with other React FLIP libraries

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

Table of Contents

• Demos
• Quick start
• The Components
  • 1. Flipper
    • Props
  • 2. Flipped
    • Basic props
    • Callback props
    • Transform props
    • Advanced props
• Scale transitions made eas(ier)
• Library details
• Troubleshooting
• Performance

Demos

Image Transitions

Usage with React Router

Stripe-Inspired Menu

List Transition

Spring Options Explorer

• Updating list (react-flip-move example clone)
• Simplest possible example
• Guitar shop
• Overly complex, nested cards example
• React-flip-toolkit logo
• Using Portals

Quick start

npm install 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

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

class AnimatedSquare extends Component {
  state = { fullScreen: false };

  toggleFullScreen = () => {
    this.setState(prevState => ({
      fullScreen: !prevState.fullScreen
    }));
  };

  render() {
    return (
      <Flipper flipKey={this.state.fullScreen}>
        <Flipped flipId="square">
          <div
            className={this.state.fullScreen ? "full-screen-square" : "square"}
            onClick={this.toggleFullScreen}
          />
        </Flipped>
      </Flipper>
    );
  }
}

view on Codepen

More useful: tweening different elements

The FLIP technique allows you to smoothly tween two completely separate elements to appear as if they are one:

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

const SmallSquare = ({ onClick }) => (
  <Flipped flipId="square">
    <div className="square" onClick={onClick} />
  </Flipped>
);

const BigSquare = ({ onClick }) => (
  <Flipped flipId="square">
    <div className="full-screen-square" onClick={onClick}/>
  </Flipped>
);

class AnimatedSquare extends Component {
  state = { fullScreen: false };

  toggleFullScreen = () => {
    this.setState(prevState => ({
      fullScreen: !prevState.fullScreen
    }));
  };

  render() {
    return (
      <Flipper flipKey={this.state.fullScreen}>
        {this.state.fullScreen ? (
          <BigSquare onClick={this.toggleFullScreen} />
        ) : (
          <SmallSquare onClick={this.toggleFullScreen} />
        )}
      </Flipper>
    );
  }
}

view on Codepen

The Components

1. Flipper

The parent wrapper component that contains all the elements to be animated. You'll most typically need only one of these per page.

<Flipper flipKey={someKeyThatChanges}>
  {/* children */}
</Flipper>

Props

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
spring	noWobble	string or object	Provide a string referencing one of the spring presets — noWobble (default), gentle, wobbly, or stiff, OR provide an object with stiffness and damping parameters. Explore the spring setting options here. The prop provided here will be the spring default that can be overrided on a per-element basis on the Flipped component.
applyTransformOrigin	true	bool	Whether or not react-flip-toolkit should apply a transform-origin of "0 0" to animating children (this is generally, but not always, desirable for FLIP animations)
element	div	string	If you'd like the wrapper element created by the Flipped container to be something other than a div, you can specify that here.
className	-	string	A class applied to the wrapper element, helpful for styling.
portalKey	-	string	In general, the Flipper component will only apply transitions to its descendents. This allows multiple Flipper elements to coexist on the same page, but it will prevent animations from working if you use portals. You can provide a unique portalKey prop to Flipper to tell it to scope element selections to the entire document, not just to its children, so that elements in portals can be transitioned.
debug	false	bool	This experimental prop will pause your animation right at the initial application of FLIP-ped styles. That will allow you to inspect the state of the animation at the very beginning, when it should look similar or identical to the UI before the animation began.

2. Flipped

Wraps an element that should 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.

The Flipped component produces no markup, it simply passes some props down to its wrapped child. If the child is a React component, make sure it passes down unknown props directly to the rendered DOM element.

Basic props

prop	default	type	details
children (required)	-	node	Wrap a single child with the Flipped component.
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.
spring	noWobble	string or object	Provide a string referencing one of the spring presets — noWobble (default), gentle, wobbly, or stiff, OR provide an object with stiffness and damping parameters. Explore the spring setting options here.
stagger	false	boolean or string	Provide a natural, spring-based staggering effect in which the spring easing of each item is pinned to the previous one's movement. Provide true to stagger the element with all other staggered elements. If you want to get more granular, you can provide a string key and the element will be staggered with other elements with the same key.

Callback props

The above animation uses onAppear and onExit callbacks for fade-in and fade-out animations.

prop	arguments	details
onAppear	element, index	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.
onDelayedAppear	element, index	This is a replacement for onAppear that is called only after all exiting elements have finished exiting. It automatically applies opacity: 0 to newly appeared elements at the very beginning. The onDelayedAppear function is responsible for setting the opacity to the final value.
onStart	element	Called when the FLIP animation starts. It is provided a reference to the DOM element being transitioned as the first argument
onComplete	element	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.)
onExit	element, index, removeElement	Called when the element is removed from the DOM. It must call the removeElement function when the exit transition has completed.

Transform props

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 props

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)

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

view on Codepen

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

By default, both the scale and the translation transforms of the parent will be counteracted (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.

For the most seamless results the DOM element with the inverse transform applied should lie flush against its parent container — that means any padding should be applied to the inverted container rather than the parent container.

Library details

• ~7kb minified and gzipped
• React 16+
• Tested in latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and IE 11.
• Uses Rematrix for matrix calculations and Wobble for spring animations.

Troubleshooting

Problem #1: Nothing is happening:

• Make sure you're updating the flipKey attribute in the Flipper component whenever an animation should happen.
• If one of your Flipped components is wrapping another React component rather than a DOM element, make sure that component passes down unknown props directly to its DOM element, e.g.: <div className="square" {...rest} />

Problem #2: Things look weird:

• 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, the animation will break. Check to make sure all flipIds are unique.
• Make sure you are animating the element you want to animate and not, for instance, a wrapper div. If you are animating an inline element like some text, but have wrapped it in a div, you're actually animating the div, which might have a much wider width that you'd expect at certain points, which will throw off the animation. Check to see if you need to add an inline-block style to the animated element.
• Make sure you don't have any competing CSS transitions on the element in question.

It's still not working: try out the debug prop

If you still can't figure out what's going wrong, you can add the the debug prop directly on your Flipper component to pause transitions at the beginning and outline the Flipped components with a hot pink outline. Here's an example of solving a problem with the debug prop:

The broken animation:

Apply the debug prop to have the FLIP animation pause at the very beginning:

We see here that the pink outline surrounding the center contents extends much further than the actual text and button. It turns out that we're flipping a wrapper div rather than the actual text and button:

<Flipped flipId='contentContainer'>
  <div>
    <p>{this.props.text}</p>
    <button onClick={this.toggleFullscreen}>Close</button>
  </div>
</Flipped>

We can either wrap both the p and the button in their own Flipped containers, or add a style of inline-block on the wrapper div. To verify once we add the fix, we can rerun the animation with the debug prop applied:

Now, the pink outline is hugging the elements that are being animated, so they are no longer getting warped.

Performance

React-flip-toolkit does a lot of work under the hood to try to maximize the performance of your animations — for instance, off-screen elements won't be animated, and style updates are batched to prevent layout thrashing. However, if you are building particularly complex animations—ones that involve dozens of elements or large images— there are some additional strategies you can use to ensure performant animations.

1. PureComponent

When you trigger a complex FLIP animation with react-flip-toolkit, React could be spending vital milliseconds doing unnecessary reconciliation work before allowing the animation to start. If you notice a slight delay between when the animation is triggered, and when it begins, this is probably the culprit. To short-circuit this possibly unnecessary work, try using PureComponent for your animated elements, and seeing if you can refactor your code to minimize prop updates to animated children when an animation is about to occur.

For example, in a hypothetical UI where you are animating the positions of several cards at once, you might want to update a Card component that looks like this:

import React, { Component } from 'react'

class Card extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
        <Flipped flipId={this.props.id}>
          <div>
          {/* card content goes here */ }
          </div>
        </Flipped>
    )
  }
}

to this:

import React, { PureComponent } from 'react'

class Card extends PureComponent {
 // everything  else is the same
}

Remember to always provide key props as appropriate to your elements, and check the React docs for some caveats on when to not use PureComponent. But if you have complex animations with noticeable lag, think about giving PureComponent a try!

2. will-change:transform

.image {
  will-change:transform;
}

This somewhat mysterious CSS property tells the browser to anticipate changes to an element. It should be used with caution, because it can increase browser resource usage. If you are animating images (svg, jpg, etc), I would recommend trying it out and seeing if it increases the performance of the animation. In my tests, when animating large images, will-change:transform increased animation frame rate considerably.