Tutorial on how to make a custom React renderer

Building a custom React renderer

Let’s make a custom React renderer 😎

Introduction

This is a small tutorial on how to build your custom React renderer and render the components to the host environment you need. The tutorial is divided into three parts -

• Part 1 - Creating a React reconciler (using react-reconciler package).

• Part 2 - Creating a public interface to the reconciler i.e “Renderer”.

• Part 3 - Creating a render method to flush everything to the host environment we need.

Brief

Part-I

In part one, we will create a React reconciler using the react-reconciler package. We will implement the renderer using Fiber as it has a first-class renderer API for creating custom renderer.

Part-II

In part two, we will create a public interface to the reconciler i.e a renderer. We will create a custom method for createElement and will also architect the component API for our example.

Part-III

In part three, we will create a render method which will render our input component.

What we will build?

We will create a custom renderer that will render a React component to a word document. I’ve already made one. Full source code and the documentation for that is available here.

We will use officegen for this. I’ll explain some of it’s basic concepts here.

Officegen can generate Open Office XML files for Microsoft Office 2007 and later. It generates a output stream and not a file. It is independent of any output tool.

Creating a document object

let doc = officegen('docx', { __someOptions__ });

Generating output stream

let output = fs.createWriteStream (__filePath__);

doc.generate(output);

Events

finalize - It is fired after a stream has been generated successfully.

error - Fired when there are any errors

Running the project

git clone https://github.com/nitin42/Making-a-custom-React-renderer
cd Making-a-custom-React-renderer
yarn install
yarn example

After you run yarn example, a docx file will be generated in the demo folder.

Contributing

Suggestions to improve the tutorial are welcome 😃.

If you’ve completed the tutorial successfully, you can either watch/star this repo or follow me on twitter for more updates.