Crafting a Dynamic Tag Input Field Component in React
Are you struggling to create a seamless tag input field component for your React application? Look no further! In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the process of building a fully functional tag input field that enhances user experience.
Visualizing the Markup
Let’s start by envisioning the markup structure of our tag input field component. We need a container that wraps both tags and an input field. As we add more tags, the input field should shift to the right, giving the impression of adding tags directly into the input field.
Pseudo Markup Structure
Our pseudo markup structure should resemble the following:
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State Variables and Event Listeners
To make our component interactive, we need two state variables: one to store the entered tags and another to control the input field. We’ll initialize these variables as an empty array and an empty string, respectively.
Next, we’ll add event listeners to track changes in the input field and create logic to populate the tags state when a specific key is pressed. Let’s assume we want to separate tags using the comma key.
Handling Input Events
We’ll use the onChange
event to listen to changes in the input field and update the input state variable. The onKeyDown
event will help us detect when the comma key is pressed.
Implementing Tag Deletion
To delete tags, we’ll use the onKeyDown
event again, this time checking for the backspace key press. We’ll also need to ensure the input field is empty and the tags array is not empty. When these conditions are met, we’ll remove the last item from the tags array and populate the input field with the deleted tag value.
Enhancing User Experience
To prevent rapid deletion of tags when holding down the backspace key, we’ll introduce a boolean state variable isKeyReleased
to track key press and release events.
Deleting Specific Tags
To enable deletion of specific tags, we’ll modify the tag markup by adding an HTML button tag. The onClick
event handler will call a deleteTag
function, which filters out tags by their index values.
Final Touches
With our fully functional tag input field component in place, we can now focus on styling to enhance its appearance. Here’s an example CSS file to get you started:
/* Add your styles here */
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