react-placeholder-fallback

Simple react component to manage when to show placeholders and fallback messages when a network request fails.

Usage no npm install needed!

<script type="module">
  import reactPlaceholderFallback from 'https://cdn.skypack.dev/react-placeholder-fallback';
</script>

README

React Placeholder Fallback

npm version

Simple react component to manage when to show placeholders and fallback messages when a network request fails.

Quick Start

Install

npm
npm install --save react-placeholder-fallback
yarn
yarn add react-placeholder-fallback

Usage

import * as React from 'react';
import { PlaceholderFallback, Placeholders } from 'react-placeholder-fallback';
import 'react-placeholder-fallback/dist/index.css'; // required if using prebuilt placeholders

class App extends React.Component {
    render() {
        return (
            <PlaceholderFallback placeholder={Placeholders.ParagraphBlock} />
        )
    }
}

What gap does this fill?

Typically one would use placeholders to simulate data is loading from a network request. This component lets you easily manage showing a placeholder and also showing a fallback message in case the network request fails. You also are in complete control of when to show the PlaceholderFallback rather then having to provide a "ready" predicate to the component like other solutions.

TypeScript Support

This library has first class support for TypeScript. Types are automatically included and don't need to be downloaded from the @types repository.

Documentation

  1. Examples
  2. Full-Example

Motivation

This project is inspired from other solutions like:

  1. https://github.com/buildo/react-placeholder
  2. https://github.com/danilowoz/react-content-loader
  3. https://github.com/krishnaxv/app-shell-placeholder
  4. https://github.com/dvtng/react-loading-skeleton

However, for my own personal needs I needed a solution that could work with very strict Content Security Policies (CSP), needed to be WCAG compliant (e.g. no use of style keyword), needed to be responsive, and could degrade nicely in Internet Explorer 11. So I stuck to using plain CSS for the styling without using fancier styling solutions like emotion or styled-components that some placeholder libraries used. Second, having used react-placeholder in the past I felt better about having direct control in my render method of when to render the Placeholder or not. So I stuck with that in mind while making this library. Lastly, I wanted a nice way to handle network request failures which other placeholder libraries don't really provide.