React Native: Getting the position of an element

Question

I am styling an Image component with flexbox to be in the center of the screen which works pretty well. Now I want a second Image component to be displayed directly on the top of the first one. The second image is using absolute positioning. Currently I'm just guessing pixels so that it fits, but of course this is not accurate and way too much maintainability effort.

I am pretty much looking for the React Native equivalent of jQuery's .offset(). Is there such a thing and if there isn't what's the best way to achieve this?

Answer 1

React Native provides a .measure(...) method which takes a callback and calls it with the offsets and width/height of a component:

myComponent.measure( (fx, fy, width, height, px, py) => {

    console.log('Component width is: ' + width)
    console.log('Component height is: ' + height)
    console.log('X offset to frame: ' + fx)
    console.log('Y offset to frame: ' + fy)
    console.log('X offset to page: ' + px)
    console.log('Y offset to page: ' + py)
})

Example...

The following calculates the layout of a custom component after it is rendered:

class MyComponent extends React.Component {
    render() {
        return <View ref={view => { this.myComponent = view; }} />
    }
    componentDidMount() {
        // Print component dimensions to console
        this.myComponent.measure( (fx, fy, width, height, px, py) => {
            console.log('Component width is: ' + width)
            console.log('Component height is: ' + height)
            console.log('X offset to frame: ' + fx)
            console.log('Y offset to frame: ' + fy)
            console.log('X offset to page: ' + px)
            console.log('Y offset to page: ' + py)
        })        
    }
}

---

Bug notes

• Note that sometimes the component does not finish rendering before componentDidMount() is called. If you are getting zeros as a result from measure(...), then wrapping it in a setTimeout should solve the problem, i.e.:

  setTimeout( myComponent.measure(...), 0 )