Crafting a Custom Star Rating Component with React

The Challenge: Creating a Half-Star Rating System

When building a rating component, the easy part is handling clicks and hover effects. The real challenge lies in implementing a specific star rating system, such as half-stars or any other precision-based rating.

Prerequisites and Setup

To follow along, you’ll need a basic understanding of React and JavaScript. We’ll be using React, Node.js, MUI for CSS prototyping, and Vite.js. If you’re new to these technologies, don’t worry – the concepts are applicable to any JavaScript framework.

Project Overview

We’ll cover the process of creating a half-star rating component, but this approach can be adapted for any precision-based rating system. We’ll break down the process into five steps:

• Setting up
• Creating half-stars with CSS
• Selecting and hovering over items
• Bonus tips
• Final thoughts

Setting Up

First, install Node.js if you haven’t already. Then, create a new React project using Vite and install MUI. You can find the latest installation instructions in the MUI documentation.

npm init vite@latest
npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

Creating Half-Stars with CSS

To create a simple star rating component UI, we’ll track totalStars and activeStars. We can then render active and inactive stars using MUI icons.

import { Star } from '@mui/icons-material';

const StarRating = () => {
  const totalStars = 5;
  const activeStars = 3;

  return (

  );
};

But how do we create a half-star rating? This is where CSS comes in. We’ll create two separate stars and use absolute positioning, overflow, and width properties to generate specific star precision.

.star {
  position: relative;
  display: inline-block;
}

.star::before {
  content: '';
  position: absolute;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  width: 50%; /* adjust this value for half-star precision */
  overflow: hidden;
}

Selecting and Hovering Over Items

To implement a precision-based rating system, we need to add functionality that allows users to select stars with precision. We’ll use DOM APIs like clientX and getBoundingClientRect to calculate the exact star position.

const handleMouseMove = (event) => {
  const rect = event.target.getBoundingClientRect();
  const x = event.clientX - rect.left;
  const starWidth = rect.width;
  const precision = x / starWidth;
  // calculate the precise value of the halfway point of each star
};

Putting it All Together

Now that we have our CSS skeleton and hover logic in place, let’s append this to our star-rating item selector. We’ll render filled stars based on the activeStar value and display a half-filled star for precision-based ratings.

const StarRating = () => {
  const totalStars = 5;
  const activeStars = 3;

  return (

  );
};

Final Thoughts

This is just one approach to creating a generic rating component in any JavaScript framework. Feel free to explore and improve upon this code. Remember, this concept is not limited to star-rating components – you can use any set of icons with filled and empty image versions.