Unlock the Power of Filtering: Building a Custom React Native Search Bar from Scratch
Imagine a digital landscape where filtering data is impossible. Sounds unimaginable, right? A search bar is a perfect example of how we can implement filtering in our daily lives. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to create a custom search bar in React Native from scratch.
Getting Started with React Native
React Native is a JavaScript-based framework that makes it easy to build cross-platform mobile applications. Before we dive into the code, make sure you have Expo installed on your machine. You can use Visual Studio Code or a similar editor to work on your project. Some basic knowledge of JavaScript and React/React Native will come in handy while following this tutorial.
Building the Search Bar
Let’s start by creating a new Expo project. Run expo init my-project in your terminal, replacing my-project with your desired project name. Then, navigate to the newly created directory and run expo start to start the development server.
Project Structure
To keep things organized, create a screens folder and a components folder in your project directory. The screens folder will contain only one file, as we’ll be working with a single screen. The components folder will hold two files: List.js and SearchBar.js.
Defining the Search Bar
In SearchBar.js, we’ll define a custom search bar component. This component will display the search bar and handle user input. We’ll use Expo vector icons to add some visual appeal to our search bar.
Implementing Text Input Listeners
The text input field contains some interesting props. The onChangeText property allows us to add a listener that triggers every time the text in the input field changes. We’ll use this feature to pass the text input from our child component (SearchBar.js) to its parent component (Home.js).
Filtering the Text Input
In List.js, we’ll use a React Native component called FlatList to render the data. We’ll define three cases to filter the list of programming languages according to the text input. We’ll convert both the input and the names to uppercase and remove all blank spaces to make the filtering logic more robust.
Finalizing the Search Bar
In Home.js, we’ll bring everything together. We’ll import our custom components List and SearchBar and define three different states: clicked, searchPhrase, and fakeData. We’ll use the useEffect Hook to fetch data from a fake API endpoint and store it in the fakeData state.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we’ve learned how to create a custom React Native search bar from scratch without relying on external libraries. We’ve explored how to implement conditional styling and filtering logic using FlatList. Feel free to use this code as a foundation for further development. The source code for this project can be found on GitHub.