You can use tooltips to provide further context for the elements of your app. However, although tooltip is considered a simple and effective element, it can be challenging to implement. For starters, you must consider various factors such as positioning, responsive layouts, and different browsers' support. Luckily, you have several libraries that may help you. This guide covers four of the most popular libraries for displaying tooltips within React apps: React Tooltip, Material UI, Bootstrap, and Semantic UI.
This guide requires that you are familiar with React components and that you know how to use props and states to manipulate them.
The libraries that this guide covers provide significant tooltip components. With each of these libraries, you can add a tooltip, set its content, and configure its setting and style.
Choose React Tooltip if you need a tooltip component for your React app and are not looking for other elements on board. React Tooltip is a tiny library that includes only a tooltip component, while the other options presented in this guide are huge UI libraries that offer many other components.
If you need a variety of elements with the same look and feel, you may want to deploy Material UI, Bootstrap, and Semantic UI. Your decision may depend on the requirements and preferences of each individual project.
React Tooltip offers a tooltip component only. Start by adding React Tooltip to a project:
1# add with npm
2npm install react-tooltip
3# or with yarn
4yarn add react-tooltip
Then, use the ReactTooltip
component to display tooltips as follows:
1import React from "react";
2
3import ReactTooltip from "react-tooltip";
4
5export default function App() {
6 return (
7 <div className="App">
8 <button data-tip data-for="registerTip">
9 Register
10 </button>
11
12 <ReactTooltip id="registerTip" place="top" effect="solid">
13 Tooltip for the register button
14 </ReactTooltip>
15 </div>
16 );
17}
The example above starts by importing the ReactTooltip
component. ReactTooltip
is used to render the content of the tooltip. Remember to specify the id
property for the tooltip and the content. Define the position of the tooltip using the place
and effect
properties. Now, you must mark the element you wish to display the tooltip for. To achieve this, use data-tip
and data-for
custom attributes. Although you may show tooltips for any element of your choice, the examples in this guide cover specifying these attributes for the <button>
element.
Use the data-tip
attribute to help React Tooltip find the element. The data-for
attribute includes the id
of the ReactTooltip
component that you declared earlier.
Refer to the API description in the GitHub repository and additional examples on the official site for more information regarding the libraries' other options regarding manipulating the position, events, and style of the tooltip .
Material-UI is a combination of React components inspired by the Material Design offered by Google that you may use in your React apps. Material-UI includes a Tooltip
component that you can utilize to display tooltips.
In order to display a basic tooltip with Material UI, do as follows:
1import React from "react";
2
3import Button from "@material-ui/core/Button";
4import Tooltip from "@material-ui/core/Tooltip";
5
6export default function App() {
7 return (
8 <div className="App">
9 <Tooltip
10 title="Tooltip for the register button"
11 placement="top"
12 >
13 <Button variant="contained">Register</Button>
14 </Tooltip>
15 </div>
16 );
17}
As shown above, start by importing the Button
and Tooltip
components. Proceed to wrap the button that you wish to display a tooltip for with the Tooltip
component. Set the properties for the tooltip; the title
and placement
properties define the text to display and position respectively.
Refer to the official site for more tooltip examples.
Bootstrap is without question one of the most popular frameworks for developing web apps. It encompasses a collection of components that enable you to display overlays, tooltips, and popovers.
Check out the following example of using React Bootstrap to display the Bootstrap tooltip:
1import React from "react";
2
3import "bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.css";
4
5import Button from "react-bootstrap/Button";
6import OverlayTrigger from "react-bootstrap/OverlayTrigger";
7import Tooltip from "react-bootstrap/Tooltip";
8
9export default function App() {
10 const renderTooltip = props => (
11 <Tooltip {...props}>Tooltip for the register button</Tooltip>
12 );
13
14 return (
15 <div className="App">
16 <OverlayTrigger placement="top" overlay={renderTooltip}>
17 <Button>Register</Button>
18 </OverlayTrigger>
19 </div>
20 );
21}
Begin by importing the Button
, Tooltip
, and OverlayTrigger
components. Do not forget to import the Bootstrap CSS file for the default theme as well.
The Tooltip
component in Bootstrap uses the OverlayTrigger
component to position itself because it does not position itself by default. In order to show the tooltip for the button, you must wrap the Button
with the OverlayTrigger
component. Use the placement
property of the overlay to set the position of the tooltip. Furthermore, use the overlay
property to set the content you wish to render for the tooltip.
The renderTooltip
function that you specified for the overlay
property returns the Tooltip
component with tooltip's content.
Refer to the official site for more tooltip examples.
Semantic UI is a prevalent UI framework with its own tooltip component that you can utilize in your React apps.
The following is an example of using the Semantic UI Popup
component to display a tooltip:
1import React from "react";
2
3import "semantic-ui-css/semantic.min.css";
4
5import { Button, Popup } from "semantic-ui-react";
6
7export default function App() {
8 return (
9 <div className="App">
10 <Popup
11 trigger={<Button>Register</Button>}
12 position="top center"
13 >
14 Tooltip for the register button
15 </Popup>
16 </div>
17 );
18}
First, import the Button
and Popup
components. For default styling, remember to import the Semantic UI semantic.min.css
file as well.
Use the Popup
component to render the tooltip. Set the trigger
property to determine the component you wish to include the tooltip for. Furthermore, experiment with the position
property to set the position of the tooltip. To set the tooltip's content, modify the content within the Popup
component.
Tooltips offer an effective yet tricky way to display extra content for UI elements. This guide covered four different approaches to including tooltips in your React apps. You can try out these four libraries and choose the one that suits your preferences and designs.