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Built with React Native - The Build.com app · React Native

Built with React Native - The Build.com app

· 5 min read

Build.com, headquartered in Chico, California, is one of the largest online retailers for home improvement items. The team has had a strong web-centric business for 18 years and began thinking about a mobile App in 2015. Building unique Android and iOS apps wasn’t practical due to our small team and limited native experience. Instead, we decided to take a risk on the very new React Native framework. Our initial commit was on August 12, 2015 using React Native v0.8.0! We were live in both App Stores on October 15, 2016. Over the last two years, we’ve continued to upgrade and expand the app. We are currently on React Native version 0.53.0.

You can check out the app at https://www.build.com/app.

Features​

Our app is full featured and includes everything that you’d expect from an e-commerce app: product listings, search and sorting, the ability to configure complex products, favorites, etc. We accept standard credit card payment methods as well as PayPal, and Apple Pay for our iOS users.

A few standout features you might not expect include:

  1. 3D models available for around 40 products with 90 finishes
  2. Augmented Reality (AR) to allow the user to see how lights and faucets will look in their home at 98% size accuracy. The Build.com React Native App is featured in the Apple App Store for AR Shopping! AR is now available for Android and iOS!
  3. Collaborative project management features that allow people to put together shopping lists for the different phases of their project and collaborate around selection

We’re working on many new and exciting features that will continue to improve our app experience including the next phase of Immersive Shopping with AR.

Our Development Workflow​

Build.com allows each dev to choose the tools that best suit them.

  • IDEs include Atom, IntelliJ, VS Code, Sublime, Eclipse, etc.
  • For Unit testing, developers are responsible for creating Jest unit tests for any new components and we’re working to increase the coverage of older parts of the app using jest-coverage-ratchet .
  • We use Jenkins to build out our beta and release candidates. This process works well for us but still requires significant work to create the release notes and other artifacts.
  • Integration Testing include a shared pool of testers that work across desktop, mobile and web. Our automation engineer is building out our suite of automated integration tests using Java and Appium.
  • Other parts of the workflow include a detailed eslint configuration, custom rules that enforce properties needed for testing, and pre-push hooks that block offending changes.

Libraries Used in the App​

The Build.com app relies on a number of common open source libraries including: Redux, Moment, Numeral, Enzyme and a bunch of React Native bridge modules. We also use a number of forked open source libraries; forked either because they were abandoned or because we needed custom features. A quick count shows around 115 JavaScript and native dependencies. We would like to explore tools that remove unused libraries.

We're in the process of adding static typing via TypeScript and looking into optional chaining. These features could help us with solving a couple classes of bugs that we still see:

  • Data that is the wrong type
  • Data that is undefined because an object didn’t contain what we expected

Open Source Contributions​

Since we rely so heavily on open source, our team is committed to contributing back to the community. Build.com allows the team to open source libraries that we've built and encourages us contribute back to the libraries that we use.

We’ve released and maintained a number of React Native libraries:

  • react-native-polyfill
  • react-native-simple-store
  • react-native-contact-picker

We have also contributed to a long list of libraries including: React and React Native, react-native-schemes-manager , react-native-swipeable , react-native-gallery , react-native-view-transformer , react-native-navigation .

Our Journey​

We’ve seen a lot of growth in React Native and the ecosystem in the past couple years. Early on, it seemed that every version of React Native would fix some bugs but introduce several more. For example, Remote JS Debugging was broken on Android for several months. Thankfully, things became much more stable in 2017.

One of our big recurring challenges has been with navigation libraries. For a long time, we were using Expo’s ex-nav library. It worked well for us but it was eventually deprecated. However, we were in heavy feature development at the time so taking time to change out a navigation library wasn’t feasible. That meant we had to fork the library and patch it to support React 16 and the iPhone X. Eventually, we were able to migrate to react-native-navigation and hopefully that will see continued support.

Bridge Modules​

Another big challenge has been with bridge modules. When we first started, a lot of critical bridges were missing. One of my teammates wrote react-native-contact-picker because we needed access to the Android contact picker in our app. We’ve also seen a lot of bridges that were broken by changes within React Native. For example, there was a breaking change within React Native v40 and when we upgraded our app, I had to submit PRs to fix 3 or 4 libraries that had not yet been updated.

Looking Forward​

As React Native continues to grow, our wishlist to our community include:

  • Stabilize and improve the navigation libraries
  • Maintain support for libraries in the React Native ecosystem
  • Improve the experience for adding native libraries and bridge modules to a project

Companies and individuals in the React Native community have been great about volunteering their time and effort to improve the tools that we all use. If you haven’t gotten involved in open source, I hope you’ll take a look at improving the code or documentation for some of the libraries that you use. There are a lot of articles to help you get started and it may be a lot easier than you think!

Tags:
  • showcase
Using TypeScript with React Native · React Native

Using TypeScript with React Native

· 8 min read

JavaScript! We all love it. But some of us also love types. Luckily, options exist to add stronger types to JavaScript. My favourite is TypeScript, but React Native supports Flow out of the box. Which you prefer is a matter of preference, they each have their own approach on how to add the magic of types to JavaScript. Today, we're going to look at how to use TypeScript in React Native apps.

This post uses Microsoft's TypeScript-React-Native-Starter repo as a guide.

Update : Since this blog post was written, things have gotten even easier. You can replace all the set up described in this blog post by running just one command:

npx react-native init MyAwesomeProject --template react-native-template-typescript

However, there are some limitations to Babel's TypeScript support, which the blog post above goes into in detail. The steps outlined in this post still work, and Artsy is still using react-native-typescript-transformer in production, but the fastest way to get up and running with React Native and TypeScript is using the above command. You can always switch later if you have to.

In any case, have fun! The original blog post continues below.

Prerequisites​

Because you might be developing on one of several different platforms, targeting several different types of devices, basic setup can be involved. You should first ensure that you can run a plain React Native app without TypeScript. Follow the instructions on the React Native website to get started. When you've managed to deploy to a device or emulator, you'll be ready to start a TypeScript React Native app.

You will also need Node.js, npm, and Yarn.

Initializing​

Once you've tried scaffolding out an ordinary React Native project, you'll be ready to start adding TypeScript. Let's go ahead and do that.

react-native init MyAwesomeProject
cd MyAwesomeProject

Adding TypeScript​

The next step is to add TypeScript to your project. The following commands will:

  • add TypeScript to your project
  • add React Native TypeScript Transformer to your project
  • initialize an empty TypeScript config file, which we'll configure next
  • add an empty React Native TypeScript Transformer config file, which we'll configure next
  • adds typings for React and React Native

Okay, let's go ahead and run these.

yarn add --dev typescript
yarn add --dev react-native-typescript-transformer
yarn tsc --init --pretty --jsx react
touch rn-cli.config.js
yarn add --dev @types/react @types/react-native

The tsconfig.json file contains all the settings for the TypeScript compiler. The defaults created by the command above are mostly fine, but open the file and uncomment the following line:

{
/* Search the config file for the following line and uncomment it. */
// "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true, /* Allow default imports from modules with no default export. This does not affect code emit, just typechecking. */
}

The rn-cli.config.js contains the settings for the React Native TypeScript Transformer. Open it and add the following:

module.exports = {
getTransformModulePath() {
return require.resolve('react-native-typescript-transformer');
},
getSourceExts() {
return ['ts', 'tsx'];
},
};

Migrating to TypeScript​

Rename the generated App.js and __tests_/App.js files to App.tsx . index.js needs to use the .js extension. All new files should use the .tsx extension (or .ts if the file doesn't contain any JSX).

If you tried to run the app now, you'd get an error like object prototype may only be an object or null . This is caused by a failure to import the default export from React as well as a named export on the same line. Open App.tsx and modify the import at the top of the file:

-import React, { Component } from 'react';
+import React from 'react'
+import { Component } from 'react';

Some of this has to do with differences in how Babel and TypeScript interoperate with CommonJS modules. In the future, the two will stabilize on the same behaviour.

At this point, you should be able to run the React Native app.

Adding TypeScript Testing Infrastructure​

React Native ships with Jest, so for testing a React Native app with TypeScript, we'll want to add ts-jest to our devDependencies .

yarn add --dev ts-jest

Then, we'll open up our package.json and replace the jest field with the following:

{
"jest": {
"preset": "react-native",
"moduleFileExtensions": [
"ts",
"tsx",
"js"
],
"transform": {
"^.+\\.(js)$": "<rootDir>/node_modules/babel-jest",
"\\.(ts|tsx)$": "<rootDir>/node_modules/ts-jest/preprocessor.js"
},
"testRegex": "(/__tests__/.*|\\.(test|spec))\\.(ts|tsx|js)$",
"testPathIgnorePatterns": [
"\\.snap$",
"<rootDir>/node_modules/"
],
"cacheDirectory": ".jest/cache"
}
}

This will configure Jest to run .ts and .tsx files with ts-jest .

Installing Dependency Type Declarations​

To get the best experience in TypeScript, we want the type-checker to understand the shape and API of our dependencies. Some libraries will publish their packages with .d.ts files (type declaration/type definition files), which can describe the shape of the underlying JavaScript. For other libraries, we'll need to explicitly install the appropriate package in the @types/ npm scope.

For example, here we'll need types for Jest, React, and React Native, and React Test Renderer.

yarn add --dev @types/jest @types/react @types/react-native @types/react-test-renderer

We saved these declaration file packages to our dev dependencies because this is a React Native app that only uses these dependencies during development and not during runtime. If we were publishing a library to NPM, we might have to add some of these type dependencies as regular dependencies.

You can read more here about getting .d.ts files.

Ignoring More Files​

For your source control, you'll want to start ignoring the .jest folder. If you're using git, we can just add entries to our .gitignore file.

# Jest
#
.jest/

As a checkpoint, consider committing your files into version control.

git init
git add .gitignore # import to do this first, to ignore our files
git add .
git commit -am "Initial commit."

Adding a Component​

Let's add a component to our app. Let's go ahead and create a Hello.tsx component. It's a pedagogical component, not something that you'd actually write in an app, but something nontrivial that shows off how to use TypeScript in React Native.

Create a components directory and add the following example.

// components/Hello.tsx
import React from 'react';
import {Button, StyleSheet, Text, View} from 'react-native';

export interface Props {
name: string;
enthusiasmLevel?: number;
}

interface State {
enthusiasmLevel: number;
}

export class Hello extends React.Component<Props, State> {
constructor(props: Props) {
super(props);

if ((props.enthusiasmLevel || 0) <= 0) {
throw new Error(
'You could be a little more enthusiastic. :D',
);
}

this.state = {
enthusiasmLevel: props.enthusiasmLevel || 1,
};
}

onIncrement = () =>
this.setState({
enthusiasmLevel: this.state.enthusiasmLevel + 1,
});
onDecrement = () =>
this.setState({
enthusiasmLevel: this.state.enthusiasmLevel - 1,
});
getExclamationMarks = (numChars: number) =>
Array(numChars + 1).join('!');

render() {
return (
<View style={styles.root}>
<Text style={styles.greeting}>
Hello{' '}
{this.props.name +
this.getExclamationMarks(this.state.enthusiasmLevel)}
</Text>

<View style={styles.buttons}>
<View style={styles.button}>
<Button
title="-"
onPress={this.onDecrement}
accessibilityLabel="decrement"
color="red"
/>
</View>

<View style={styles.button}>
<Button
title="+"
onPress={this.onIncrement}
accessibilityLabel="increment"
color="blue"
/>
</View>
</View>
</View>
);
}
}

// styles
const styles = StyleSheet.create({
root: {
alignItems: 'center',
alignSelf: 'center',
},
buttons: {
flexDirection: 'row',
minHeight: 70,
alignItems: 'stretch',
alignSelf: 'center',
borderWidth: 5,
},
button: {
flex: 1,
paddingVertical: 0,
},
greeting: {
color: '#999',
fontWeight: 'bold',
},
});

Whoa! That's a lot, but let's break it down:

  • Instead of rendering HTML elements like div , span , h1 , etc., we're rendering components like View and Button . These are native components that work across different platforms.
  • Styling is specified using the StyleSheet.create function that React Native gives us. React's stylesheets allow us to control our layout using Flexbox, and style using other constructs similar to those in CSS.

Adding a Component Test​

Now that we've got a component, let's try testing it.

We already have Jest installed as a test runner. We're going to write snapshot tests for our components, let's add the required add-on for snapshot tests:

yarn add --dev react-addons-test-utils

Now let's create a __tests__ folder in the components directory and add a test for Hello.tsx :

// components/__tests__/Hello.tsx
import React from 'react';
import renderer from 'react-test-renderer';

import {Hello} from '../Hello';

it('renders correctly with defaults', () => {
const button = renderer
.create(<Hello name="World" enthusiasmLevel={1} />)
.toJSON();
expect(button).toMatchSnapshot();
});

The first time the test is run, it will create a snapshot of the rendered component and store it in the components/__tests__/__snapshots__/Hello.tsx.snap file. When you modify your component, you'll need to update the snapshots and review the update for inadvertent changes. You can read more about testing React Native components here.

Next Steps​

Check out the official React tutorial and state-management library Redux. These resources can be helpful when writing React Native apps. Additionally, you may want to look at ReactXP, a component library written entirely in TypeScript that supports both React on the web as well as React Native.

Have fun in a more type-safe React Native development environment!

Tags:
  • engineering
Read article
State of React Native 2018 · React Native

State of React Native 2018

· 5 min read

It's been a while since we last published a status update about React Native.

At Facebook, we're using React Native more than ever and for many important projects. One of our most popular products is Marketplace, one of the top-level tabs in our app which is used by 800 million people each month. Since its creation in 2015, all of Marketplace has been built with React Native, including over a hundred full-screen views throughout different parts of the app.

We're also using React Native for many new parts of the app. If you watched the F8 keynote last month, you'll recognize Blood Donations, Crisis Response, Privacy Shortcuts, and Wellness Checks – all recent features built with React Native. And projects outside the main Facebook app are using React Native too. The new Oculus Go VR headset includes a companion mobile app that is fully built with React Native, not to mention React VR powering many experiences in the headset itself.

Naturally, we also use many other technologies to build our apps. Litho and ComponentKit are two libraries we use extensively in our apps; both provide a React-like component API for building native screens. It's never been a goal for React Native to replace all other technologies – we are focused on making React Native itself better, but we love seeing other teams borrow ideas from React Native, like bringing instant reload to non-JavaScript code too.

Architecture​

When we started the React Native project in 2013, we designed it to have a single “bridge” between JavaScript and native that is asynchronous, serializable, and batched. Just as React DOM turns React state updates into imperative, mutative calls to DOM APIs like document.createElement(attrs) and .appendChild() , React Native was designed to return a single JSON message that lists mutations to perform, like [["createView", attrs], ["manageChildren", ...]] . We designed the entire system to never rely on getting a synchronous response back and to ensure everything in that list could be fully serialized to JSON and back. We did this for the flexibility it gave us: on top of this architecture, we were able to build tools like Chrome debugging, which runs all the JavaScript code asynchronously over a WebSocket connection.

Over the last 5 years, we found that these initial principles have made building some features harder. An asynchronous bridge means you can't integrate JavaScript logic directly with many native APIs expecting synchronous answers. A batched bridge that queues native calls means it's harder to have React Native apps call into functions that are implemented natively. And a serializable bridge means unnecessary copying instead of directly sharing memory between the two worlds. For apps that are entirely built in React Native, these restrictions are usually bearable. But for apps with complex integration between React Native and existing app code, they are frustrating.

We're working on a large-scale rearchitecture of React Native to make the framework more flexible and integrate better with native infrastructure in hybrid JavaScript/native apps. With this project, we'll apply what we've learned over the last 5 years and incrementally bring our architecture to a more modern one. We're rewriting many of React Native's internals, but most of the changes are under the hood: existing React Native apps will continue to work with few or no changes.

To make React Native more lightweight and fit better into existing native apps, this rearchitecture has three major internal changes. First, we are changing the threading model. Instead of each UI update needing to perform work on three different threads, it will be possible to call synchronously into JavaScript on any thread for high-priority updates while still keeping low-priority work off the main thread to maintain responsiveness. Second, we are incorporating async rendering capabilities into React Native to allow multiple rendering priorities and to simplify asynchronous data handling. Finally, we are simplifying our bridge to make it faster and more lightweight; direct calls between native and JavaScript are more efficient and will make it easier to build debugging tools like cross-language stack traces.

Once these changes are completed, closer integrations will be possible. Today, it's not possible to incorporate native navigation and gesture handling or native components like UICollectionView and RecyclerView without complex hacks. After our changes to the threading model, building features like this will be straightforward.

We'll release more details about this work later this year as it approaches completion.

Community​

Alongside the community inside Facebook, we're happy to have a thriving population of React Native users and collaborators outside Facebook. We'd like to support the React Native community more, both by serving React Native users better and by making the project easier to contribute to.

Just as our architecture changes will help React Native interoperate more cleanly with other native infrastructure, React Native should be slimmer on the JavaScript side to fit better with the JavaScript ecosystem, which includes making the VM and bundler swappable. We know the pace of breaking changes can be hard to keep up with, so we'd like to find ways to have fewer major releases. Finally, we know that some teams are looking for more thorough documentation in topics like startup optimization, where our expertise hasn't yet been written down. Expect to see some of these changes over the coming year.

If you're using React Native, you're part of our community; keep letting us know how we can make React Native better for you.

React Native is just one tool in a mobile developer's toolbox, but it's one that we strongly believe in – and we're making it better every day, with over 2500 commits in the last year from 500+ contributors.

Tags:
  • engineering
Read article
Releasing 0.56 · React Native

Releasing 0.56

· 5 min read

The long-awaited 0.56 version of React Native is now available 🎉. This blog post highlights some of the changes introduced in this new release. We also want to take the opportunity to explain what has kept us busy since March.

The breaking changes dilemma, or, "when to release?"​

The Contributor's Guide explains the integration process that all changes to React Native go through. The project has is composed by many different tools, requiring coordination and constant support to keep everything working properly. Add to this the vibrant open source community that contributes back to the project, and you will get a sense of the mind-bending scale of it all.

With React Native's impressive adoption, breaking changes must be made with great care, and the process is not as smooth as we'd like. A decision was made to skip the April and May releases to allow the core team to integrate and test a new set of breaking changes. Dedicated community communication channels were used along the way to ensure that the June 2018 ( 0.56.0 ) release is as hassle-free as possible to adopt by those who patiently waited for the stable release.

Is 0.56.0 perfect? No, as every piece of software out there: but we reached a point where the tradeoff between "waiting for more stability" versus "testing led to successful results so we can push forward" that we feel ready to release it. Moreover, we are aware of a few issues that are not solved in the final 0.56.0 release. Most developers should have no issues upgrading to 0.56.0 . For those that are blocked by the aforementioned issues, we hope to see you around in our discussions and we are looking forward to working with you on a solution to these issues.

You might consider 0.56.0 as a fundamental building block towards a more stable framework: it will take probably a week or two of widespread adoption before all the edge cases will be sanded off, but this will lead to an even better July 2018 ( 0.57.0 ) release.

We'd like to conclude this section by thanking all the 67 contributors who worked on a total of 818 commits (!) that will help make your apps even better 👏.

And now, without further ado...

The Big Changes​

Babel 7​

As you may know, the transpiler tool that allows us all to use the latest and greatest features of JavaScript, Babel, is moving to v7 soon. Since this new version brings along some important changes, we felt that now it would be a good time to upgrade, allowing Metro to leverage on its improvements.

If you find yourself in trouble with upgrading, please refer to the documentation section related to it.

Modernizing Android support​

On Android, much of the surrounding tooling has changed. We've updated to Gradle 3.5, Android SDK 26, Fresco to 1.9.0, and OkHttp to 3.10.0 and even the NDK API target to API 16. These changes should go without issue and result in faster builds. More importantly, it will help developers comply with the new Play Store requirements coming into effect next month.

Related to this, we'd like to particularly thank Dulmandakh for the many PRs submitted in order to make it possible 👏.

There are some more steps that need to be taken in this direction, and you can follow along with the future planning and discussion of updating the Android support in the dedicated issue (and a side one for the JSC).

New Node, Xcode, React, and Flow – oh my!​

Node 8 is now the standard for React Native. It was actually already being tested already, but we've put both feet forward as Node 6 entered maintenance mode. React was also updated to 16.4, which brings a ton of fixes with it.

We're dropping support for iOS 8, making iOS 9 the oldest iOS version that can be targeted. We do not foresee this being a problem, as any device that can run iOS 8, can be upgraded to iOS 9. This change allowed us to remove rarely-used code that implemented workarounds for older devices running iOS 8.

The continuous integration toolchain has been updated to use Xcode 9.4, ensuring that all iOS tests are run on the latest developer tools provided by Apple.

We have upgraded to Flow 0.75 to use the new error format that many devs appreciate. We've also created types for many more components. If you're not yet enforcing static typing in your project, please consider using Flow to identify problems as you code instead of at runtime.

And a lot of other things...​

For instance, YellowBox was replaced with a new implementation that makes debugging a lot better.

For the complete release notes, please reference the full changelog here. And remember to keep an eye on the upgrading guide to avoid issues moving to this new version.


A final note: starting this week, the React Native core team will resume holding monthly meetings. We'll make sure to keep everyone up-to-date with what's covered, and ensure to keep your feedback at hand for future meetings.

Happy coding everyone!

Lorenzo, Ryan, and the whole React Native core team

PS: as always, we'd like to remind everyone that React Native is still in 0.x versioning because of the many changes still undergoing - so remember when upgrading that yes, probably, something may still crash or be broken. Be helpful towards each other in the issues and when submitting PRs - and remember to follow the CoC enforced: there's always a human on the other side of the screen.

Tags:
  • announcement
  • release
Read article
Accessibility API Updates · React Native

Accessibility API Updates

· 7 min read

Motivation​

As technology advances and mobile apps become increasingly important to everyday life, the necessity of creating accessible applications has likewise grown in importance.

React Native's limited Accessibility API has always been a huge pain point for developers, so we've made a few updates to the Accessibility API to make it easier to create inclusive mobile applications.

Problems With the Existing API​

Problem One: Two Completely Different Yet Similar Props - accessibilityComponentType (Android) and accessibilityTraits (iOS)​

accessibilityComponentType and accessibilityTraits are two properties that are used to tell TalkBack on Android and VoiceOver on iOS what kind of UI element the user is interacting with. The two biggest problems with these properties are that:

  1. They are two different properties with different usage methods, yet have the same purpose. In the previous API, these are two separate properties (one for each platform), which was not only inconvenient, but also confusing to many developers. accessibilityTraits on iOS allows 17 different values while accessibilityComponentType on Android allows only 4 values. Furthermore, the values for the most part had no overlap. Even the input types for these two properties are different. accessibilityTraits allows either an array of traits to be passed in or a single trait, while accessibilityComponentType allows only a single value.
  2. There is very limited functionality on Android. With the old property, the only UI elements that Talkback were able to recognize were “button,” “radiobutton_checked,” and “radiobutton_unchecked.”

Problem Two: Non-existent Accessibility Hints:​

Accessibility Hints help users using TalkBack or VoiceOver understand what will happen when they perform an action on an accessibility element that is not apparent by only the accessibility label. These hints can be turned on and off in the settings panel. Previously, React Native's API did not support accessibility hints at all.

Problem Three: Ignoring Inverted Colors:​

Some users with vision loss use inverted colors on their mobile phones to have greater screen contrast. Apple provided an API for iOS which allows developers to ignore certain views. This way, images and videos aren't distorted when a user has the inverted colors setting on. This API is currently unsupported by React Native.

Design of the New API​

Solution One: Combining accessibilityComponentType (Android) and accessibilityTraits (iOS)​

In order to solve the confusion between accessibilityComponentType and accessibilityTraits , we decided to merge them into a single property. This made sense because they technically had the same intended functionality and by merging them, developers no longer had to worry about platform specific intricacies when building accessibility features.

Background

On iOS, UIAccessibilityTraits is a property that can be set on any NSObject. Each of the 17 traits passed in through the javascript property to native is mapped to a UIAccessibilityTraits element in Objective-C. Traits are each represented by a long int, and every trait that is set is ORed together.

On Android however, AccessibilityComponentType is a concept that was made up by React Native, and doesn't directly map to any properties in Android. Accessibility is handled by an accessibility delegate. Each view has a default accessibility delegate. If you want to customize any accessibility actions, you have to create a new accessibility delegate, override specific methods you want to customize, and then set the accessibility delegate of the view you are handling to be associated with the new delegate. When a developer set AccessibilityComponentType , the native code created a new delegate based off of the component that was passed in, and set the view to have that accessibility delegate.

Changes Made

For our new property, we wanted to create a superset of the two properties. We decided to keep the new property modeled mostly after the existing property accessibilityTraits , since accessibilityTraits has significantly more values. The functionality of Android for these traits would be polyfilled in by modifying the Accessibility Delegate.

There are 17 values of UIAccessibilityTraits that accessibilityTraits on iOS can be set to. However, we didn't include all of them as possible values to our new property. This is because the effect of setting some of these traits is actually not very well known, and many of these values are virtually never used.

The values UIAccessibilityTraits were set to generally took on one of two purposes. They either described a role that UI element had, or they described the state a UI element was in. Most uses of the previous properties we observed usually used one value that represented a role and combined it with either “state selected,” “state disabled,” or both. Therefore, we decided to create two new accessibility properties: accessibilityRole and accessibilityState .

accessibilityRole

The new property, accessibilityRole , is used to tell Talkback or Voiceover the role of a UI Element. This new property can take on one of the following values:

  • none
  • button
  • link
  • search
  • image
  • keyboardkey
  • text
  • adjustable
  • header
  • summary
  • imagebutton

This property only allows one value to be passed in because UI elements generally don't logically take on more than one of these. The exception is image and button, so we've added a role imagebutton that is a combination of both.

accessibilityStates

The new property, accessibilityStates , is used to tell Talkback or Voiceover the state a UI Element is in. This property takes on an Array containing one or both of the following values:

  • selected
  • disabled

Solution Two: Adding Accessibility Hints​

For this, we added a new property, accessibilityHint . Setting this property will allow Talkback or Voiceover to recite the hint to users.

accessibilityHint

This property takes in the accessibility hint to be read in the form of a String.

On iOS, setting this property will set the corresponding native property AccessibilityHint on the view. The hint will then be read by Voiceover if Accessibility Hints are turned on in the iPhone.

On Android, setting this property appends the value of the hint to the end of the accessibility label. The upside to this implementation is that it mimics the behavior of hints on iOS, but the downside to this implementation is that these hints cannot be turned off in the settings on Android the way they can be on iOS.

The reason we made this decision on Android is because normally, accessibility hints correspond with a specific action (e.g. click), and we wanted to keep behaviors consistent across platforms.

Solution to Problem Three​

accessibilityIgnoresInvertColors

We exposed Apple's api AccessibilityIgnoresInvertColors to JavaScript, so now when you have a view where you don't want colors to be inverted (e.g image), you can set this property to true, and it won't be inverted.

New Usage​

These new properties will become available in the React Native 0.57 release.

How to Upgrade​

If you are currently using accessibilityComponentType and accessibilityTraits , here are the steps you can take to upgrade to the new properties.

1. Using jscodeshift​

The most simple use cases can be replaced by running a jscodeshift script.

This script replaces the following instances:

accessibilityTraits=“trait”
accessibilityTraits={[“trait”]}

With

accessibilityRole= “trait”

This script also removes instances of AccessibilityComponentType (assuming everywhere you set AccessibilityComponentType , you would also set AccessibilityTraits ).

2. Using a manual codemod​

For the cases that used AccessibilityTraits that don't have a corresponding value for AccessibilityRole , and the cases where multiple traits were passed into AccessibilityTraits , a manual codemod would have to be done.

In general,

accessibilityTraits= {[“button”, “selected”]}

would be manually replaced with

accessibilityRole=“button”
accessibilityStates={[“selected”]}

These properties are already being used in Facebook's codebase. The codemod for Facebook was surprisingly simple. The jscodeshift script fixed about half of our instances, and the other half was fixed manually. Overall, the entire process took less than a few hours.

Hopefully you will find the updated API useful! And please continue making apps accessible! #inclusion

Tags:
  • engineering
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Introducing new iOS WebViews · React Native

Introducing new iOS WebViews

· 2 min read

For a long time now, Apple has discouraged using UIWebViews in favor of WKWebView. In iOS 12, which will be released in the upcoming months, UIWebViews will be formally deprecated. React Native's iOS WebView implementation relies heavily on the UIWebView class. Therefore, in light of these developments, we've built a new native iOS backend to the WebView React Native component that uses WKWebView.

The tail end of these changes were landed in this commit, and will become available in the 0.57 release.

To opt into this new implementation, please use the useWebKit prop:

<WebView
useWebKit={true}
source={{url: 'https://www.google.com'}}
/>

Improvements​

UIWebView had no legitimate way to facilitate communication between the JavaScript running in the WebView, and React Native. When messages were sent from the WebView, we relied on a hack to deliver them to React Native. Succinctly, we encoded the message data into a url with a special scheme, and navigated the WebView to it. On the native side, we intercepted and cancelled this navigation, parsed the data from the url, and finally called into React Native. This implementation was error prone and insecure. I'm glad to announce that we've leveraged WKWebView features to completely replace it.

Other benefits of WKWebView over UIWebView include faster JavaScript execution, and a multi-process architecture. Please see this 2014 WWDC for more details.

Caveats​

If your components use the following props, then you may experience problems when switching to WKWebView. For the time being, we suggest that you avoid using these props:

Inconsistent behavior:

automaticallyAdjustContentInsets and contentInsets (commit)

When you add contentInsets to a WKWebView , it doesn't change the WKWebView 's viewport. The viewport remains the same size as the frame. With UIWebView , the viewport size actually changes (gets smaller, if the content insets are positive).

backgroundColor (commit)

With the new iOS implementation of WebView, there's a chance that your background color will flicker into view if you use this property. Furthermore, WKWebView renders transparent backgrounds differently from UIWebview . Please look at the commit description for more details.

Not supported:

scalesPageToFit (commit)

WKWebView didn't support the scalesPageToFit prop, so we couldn't implement this on the WebView React Native component.

Tags:
  • engineering
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