react-native-draglist

FlatList that can be reordered by dragging its items

Why Does This Exist At All?

Given react-native-draggable-flatlist, why is there also this package?

Great question. react-native-draggable-flatlist has silky-smooth animations, supports horizontal lists as well, contains dozens of code files, and even manipulates internal data structures in react-native-reanimated to make the animations work. You should absolutely use, and prefer, react-native-draggable-flatlist, if it works for you.

react-native-draglist exists because react-native-reanimated, which react-native-draggable-flatlist depends on, randomly hangs and crashes apps through a variety of issues, several of which have not been fixed despite several major “stable” releases. Furthermore, the hangs and crashes are both frequent and hard to reliably reproduce, making their timely resolution unlikely.

What Is react-native-draglist

This package is a basic version of react-native-draggable-flatlist without dependencies on anything except react and react-native. Specifically, it is deliberately built to avoid react-native-reanimated and its hanging/crashing issues.

It is limited in the following ways:

• It does not animate as smoothly (though it does useNativeDriver)
• It only handles vertical lists (though adding horizontal in a PR won’t be hard)

Installation

With no dependencies outside of react-native and react, this package installs super easily:

npm install react-native-draglist

or

yarn add react-native-draglist

Use

All FlatList properties are supported, with the following extensions/modifications:

• renderItem is now passed a DragListRenderItemInfo, which extends ListRenderItemInfo with these additional fields:

• async onReordered(fromIndex: number, toIndex: number) is called once the user drops a dragged item in its new position. This is not called if the user drops the item back in the spot it started. DragList will await this function, and not reset its UI until it completes, so that you can make modifications to the underlying data before the list resets its state.
  • fromIndex will be between 0 and data.length (the total number of items you gave DragList to render).
  • toIndex reflects the position to which the item should be moved in the pre-modified data. It will never equal fromIndex. So, for instance, if toIndex is 0, you should make data[fromIndex] the first element of data. Note: if the user drags the item to the very end of the list, toIndex will equal data.length (i.e. it will reference an index that is one beyond the end of the list).

Typical Flow

1. Set up DragList much like you do any FlatList, except with a renderItem that calls onStartDrag at the appropriate time.
2. When onReordered gets called, update the ordering of data.

That’s basically it.

Show Me The Code

import React, {useState} from "react";
import {TouchableOpacity} from "react-native";
import DragList, { DragListRenderItemInfo } from "react-native-draglist";

const SOUND_OF_SILENCE = ["hello","darkness","my","old","friend"];

function DraggableLyrics() {
  const [data, setData] = useState(SOUND_OF_SILENCE);

  function keyExtractor(str: string) {
    return str;
  }

  function renderItem(info: DragListRenderItemInfo) {
    const {item, onStartDrag, isActive} = info;

    return (
      <TouchableOpacity
        key={item}
        style={{backgroundColor: isActive ? "blue" : "black"}}
        onPress={onStartDrag}
      >
        <Text>{item}</Text>
      </TouchableOpacity>
    );
  }

  async function onReordered(fromIndex: number, toIndex: number) {
    // Since we remove the element first, account for its index shift
    const finalIndex = fromIndex < toIndex ? toIndex - 1 : toIndex;
    const copy = [...data];		// Don't modify react data in-place
    const removed = copy.splice(fromIndex, 1);

    copy.splice(finalIndex, 0, removed[0]);	// Now insert at the new pos
	setData(copy);
  }

  return (
    <DragList
      data={data}
      keyExtractor={keyExtractor}
      onReordered={onReordered}
      renderItem={renderItem}
    />
  );
}

Caveats

This package is implemented with probably 1/10th the files, and 1/20th the advanced concepts, as react-native-draggable-flatlist. The latter even directly modifies unpublished internal data structures of react-native-reanimated, so it’s all sorts of advanced in ways that this package will never be. You should prefer, and default to, using react-native-draggable-flatlist unless its random hangs and crashes bother you.

If you have suggestions, or better yet, PRs for how this package can be improved, please connect via GitHub!

GitHub

View Github