React is an excellent library for building component-based UI with reusability in mind. You can create tons of components and reuse them across multiple pages. Occasionally, for styling purposes, you may want to override the default right-click menu or the context menu in your React app.
You can easily create a context menu by creating a custom component for handling right clicks and displaying the menu. In this guide, you will learn how to create a reusable and flexible context menu component in your React app.
To override the default browser right-click menu, the first step is to prevent the default right-click behavior. This can be done by listening to the contextmenu
event and using the preventDefault()
method on the event.
1document.addEventListener("contextmenu", (event) => {
2 event.preventDefault();
3});
Next, capture the current (x,y) position, and render your component at that coordinate on the page. Get the x and y position from the pageX
and pageY
properties from the event object.
1document.addEventListener("contextmenu", (event) => {
2 event.preventDefault();
3 const xPos = event.pageX + "px";
4 const yPos = event.pageY + "px";
5 //
6});
Then, pass the coordinates as the position style attribute to the component. The critical point to note here is that the custom menu should have the position
style set to absolute
for the menu to open at the correct position.
1<ContextMenu style={{ top: xPos, left: yPos }} />
That's a general overview of implementation.
Consider this guide as a gateway to exploring more advanced use cases, such as creating custom hooks in functional components, overriding default browser UI components like context menu, etc. You will get better at developing custom UI components if you understand the implementation logic behind them. In any case, to override default behavior, the first thing you need to do is prevent the event by using preventDefault()
.