Problem: Modals & the ceremony around managing them

I love that react allows us to write declarative user interfaces using JavaScript and JSX. However, when it comes to modals, I dislike how they are usually implemented in react - as hidden markup alongside main content made visible or hidden in response to state changes. This forces us to split our logic flow to different methods, and adds extra ceremony if we need to share any data between them.

To understand what I mean, look at the below fictitious example:

To start with, we have three methods, one for executing some logic before opening the modal, one to continue executing some logic after users confirms on the modal, and one to cleanup and hide the modal if the user cancelled.

There are multiple state variables for storing current order and customer details. These are temporarily stored during the lifetime of the modal, just so that we can share some data between the two methods and the modal. 

Then there is the visibility state variable for the modal itself.

Now, I am OK with this code even with all the boilerplate and ceremony; as long as there are no other modals on the same page. But if we introduce one more, it doubles the complexity!! Add one more, it becomes a maintainability nightmare.

The solution is what I call 'Awaitable Modals'. Or more appropriately, modals with an imperative API. In general, UI should be declarative and usage of imperative APIs are  not advised. However, I believe modals, alerts and toasts are good examples where an imperative API is so much better and makes sense. It's easier to imagine them as temporary UI elements that show up in response to user actions, instead of something that represents the application state.

This is so much simpler!  Let's list down the differences.

Modelling the modal API like this has made it easier for me to simplify the complexity around them in more than a few projects. I have been doing it like this since the Angular JS days of my early career, and I find it very useful.

Let's dive into how we can implement this API in React Native. Even though I am using React Native here, same pattern can be used with React web as well. Just change all 

's or semantically appropriate elements, and use your favourite modal library for the 

 function as parameter. It should return an object with 

 properties. We need a state variable as well here for controlling the visibility of the modal.

 for taking in additional parameters when opening the modal. Let's make the change.

I left a few comments in the code. These are the pending dots that need to be connected to make it work. A 

 variable works well here, which would hold all these values and methods for us.

Here's how it the finished hook would look:

We can use it as shown in the example under 

Here's a demo of the hook in action.
The code and sample usage are available at: 

sarathkcm/react-native-awaitable-modals

I wanted to acknowledge that this is not something new and if you searched google for an "imperative modal in react" you will find a lot of articles with various implementations. Some of the implementations actually closely resemble what I had implemented before in my projects, using a context and a global placeholder for rendering the modals. The general idea of an imperative modal itself is not new regardless of the framework, and there are many ways to achieve the same result.

The method mentioned in this article is something I came up only for the article. I like that it's isolated and scoped only to the parent page/component. However, since it's not something I use in production (yet), if you wanted to use it in your project, please make sure to test it thoroughly.

Modals in React and React Native for enabling better logic flow and removing code clutter. Awaitable modals expose an imperative API for showing, hiding and getting data from modals.

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Awaitable Modals in React and React Native; Easily manage modals without pain.

Modals in React and React Native for enabling better logic flow and removing code clutter. Awaitable modals expose an imperative API for showing, hiding and getting data from modals.

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