react-faux-dom

DOM like data structure to be mutated by D3 et al, then rendered to React elements.

// Create your element.
var el = ReactFauxDOM.createElement('div')

// Change stuff using actual DOM functions.
// Even perform CSS selections.
el.style.setProperty('color', 'red')
el.setAttribute('class', 'box')

// Render it to React elements.
return el.toReact()

// Yields: <div style='color: red;' className='box'></div>

It supports a wide range of DOM operations and will fool most libraries but it isn't exhaustive (the full DOM API is ludicrously large). It supports enough to work with D3 but will require you to fork and add to the project if you encounter something that's missing.

You can think of this as a bare bones jsdom that's built to bridge the gap between the declarative React and the imperative JavaScript world. We just need to expand it as we go along since jsdom is a huge project that solves different problems.

I'm trying to keep it light so as not to slow down your render function. I want efficient, declarative and stateless code, but I don't want to throw away previous tools to get there.

Limitations

It's great for...

• Static D3 components or other such libraries (things like Backbone should work too!)
• D3 components with simple state and event interaction, like tooltips on charts
• D3 components such as progress bars that can be animated using react-motion, for example

It's not so great for...

• Physics based D3 components or anything using a lot of DOM mutation and state
• Linked to the previous one, brushing and filtering of selections using the built in stateful D3 tools
• Essentially: Anything with a lot of DOM mutation from timers, events or internal state will be hard to use

If you keep it stateless and React-ish then you'll be fine. Use tools like D3 to fluently build your charts / DOM, don't use it as an animation / physics / DOM mutation library, that doesn't work within React. See the state example linked below for a simple way to handle state, events and D3.

Usage

• Full documentation with current DOM API coverage
• An example static chart (source)
• A simple example using state and events (source)
• d3-react-sparkline, a small component I built at Qubit

Development

# Fetch the dependencies
make bootstrap

# Test
make test

# Test continually
make test-watch

Author

Oliver Caldwell (@OliverCaldwell)

Unlicenced

Find the full unlicense in the UNLICENSE file, but here's a snippet.

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

Do what you want. Learn as much as you can. Unlicense more software.