useComponentSlots - Web Component-style slots for React Components

This software was designed to save you development time and money

Did it help? Consider donating some of your savings towards further enhancements to the software!

When searching for "React component slots" often you find articles that show something like this for syntax:

<MyComponent
  title={<h1>My Component Title</h1>}
  description={<p>Some descriptive text</p>}
>
  <p>General content inside the module</p>
</MyComponent>

In vanilla Javascript web components, however, the syntax is (to me) quite a bit more readable:

<my-component>
  <h1 slot="title">My Component Title</h1>
  <p slot="description">Some descriptive text</p>
  <p>General content inside the module</p>
</my-component>

The useComponentSlots hook brings support for this style of syntax into your React components, making it extremely easy to not only set up a component that takes content in multiple locations in the template, but also to implement that component in your codebase.

How to use

Add the package to your React app:

npm install use-componentslots

Add the hook to whatever component is going to use it:

import useComponentSlots from 'use-componentslots';

Then, use the hook in your component to create a component in your render function that will render your main component's children in named locations within the component template.

const MyDialog = ({children}) => {
  const [Slot] = useComponentSlots(children);

  return (
    <dialog>
      <header>
        <Slot name='title'>Default Dialog Title</Slot>
      </header>
      <main>
        <Slot></Slot>
      </main>
    </dialog>
  )
};

export default MyDialog;

As you can see from the above example:

• You can define default content in a named Slot which will be rendered if the slot is not used
• The default location doesn't require a name attribute

Now, in any Component that uses this slotted Component, you can put all the JSX into the main children instead of having to use named props:

<MyDialog>
  <span slot='title'>This text will be shown instead of "Default Dialog Title"</span>
  <p>
    Any children without a "slot" prop will automatically get collected into the default location
  </p>
  <p>
    You can even have multiple children, and they'll all get collected into the proper Slot for rendering
  </p>
</MyDialog>

Advanced Example

Conditional Rendering

useComponentSlots includes a function you can use to test the existence of a named slot, which allows for conditional rendering:

const MyDialog = ({children}) => {
  const [Slot, hasSlot] = useComponentSlots(children);

  return (
    <dialog>
      <heading>
        <Slot name='title'>Default Dialog Title</Slot>
      </heading>
      <main>
        <Slot></Slot>
      </main>
      {
        // the footer won't render unless there's at least one child with a slot prop of 'buttons'
        hasSlot('buttons') && <footer>
          <Slot name='buttons'></Slot>
        </footer>
      }
    </dialog>
  )
};

export default MyDialog;

You can see a demo online at https://starkraving.github.io/slotted-react-component/