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@tidepool/viz's usage of React Motion

The history of React and animation is not an untroubled one. Tools for even simple CSS3-based animations on mounting and unmounting components—a very common use case—didn't even exist (in the form of the React(CSS)TransitionGroup addons) until version 0.5.0 (released in October of 2013). And even the ReactCSSTransitionGroup and ReactTransitionGroup solutions are not great, as their requirements for successful usage are rather unintuitive.

A number of additional libraries have tried to solve various pieces of the React & animation problem, and React motion is perhaps the most popular. Because its TransitionMotion API suits most of our use cases and because it's a popular project with a reasonably large community behind it, we have chosen it as our default replacement for D3's transition API for animating transitions in our data visualizations.

As a library, React motion exports four commonly-used things:

  • the spring function, which can be customized with a set of parameters (namely: stiffness, damping, and precision); it provides the interpolation between the starting and ending states that you're animating
  • the Motion component for animating on mount and/or between two states
  • the TransitionMotion component for animating exiting and (re)entering components (as well as mounting and transitioning, just like Motion)
  • the StaggeredMotion component for, you guessed it, staggered animations

At Tidepool so far we are only using spring and TransitionMotion, and it isn't very likely that that will change. Motion is not useful to us since it doesn't allow for animation on component unmount1, and we generally want animations at every possible (for the particular component) moment in the lifecycle: on initial mount, on transition, on exit/unmount, and on re-entry. And the use cases that StaggeredMotion works for are a fairly restricted subset of stagger animations2 that we don't have in our visualizations.

For example code and a detailed tutorial on using TransitionMotion for transitions in a data visualization rendered in inline SVG via React, see the following:

Simplest examples (1): "TransitionMotion for grow-in, shrink-out single SVG <rect>"

See the Pen TransitionMotion for grow-in, shrink-out single SVG by Jana Beck (@jebeck) on CodePen.

<script async src="https://production-assets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>

Simplest examples (2): "TransitionMotion for grow-in, shrink-out single SVG <circle>"

See the Pen TransitionMotion for grow-in, shrink-out single SVG by Jana Beck (@jebeck) on CodePen.

<script async src="https://production-assets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>

More complex example: "TransitionMotion for grow-in, shrink-out of stacked <rect>s"

See the Pen TransitionMotion for grow-in, shrink-out of stacked s by Jana Beck (@jebeck) on CodePen.

<script async src="https://production-assets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>

Footnotes

  1. At present, though in this issue the library's author Cheng Lou advocates for someone to extend the Motion component's functionality to include single element enter and leave animations. ↩

  2. StaggeredMotion works only in cases where the staggered values depend on each other. It does not fit use cases such as staggering the mounting animation of a day's worth of CGM values, where each value (both x- and y- coordinates since there may be small (or large) time gaps in the data) is not strictly dependent on the previous (or next) value. ↩