elm-animate-height

Animate the height of a container to its contents

Key features

Simple api

Simply get any view and elm-animate-height will take care of animating.. well.. the height!

Hides complexity

Animating the height of a container in a resilient way can get really tricky really fast! There's performance, dom queries, height information to manage, timing calculations, interruptions and a whole lot of gnarly edge cases. From the outset elm-animate-height's number one goal was to make set up as frictionless as possible.

Here are the steps,

Set an initial state in your model.

init : Model
init = initialState (uniqueContainerId "123")

Subcribe to AnimateHeight subscription.

subscriptions : Model -> Sub Msg
subscriptions model = 
    Sub.map AnimateMsg (AnimateHeight.subscription model)

Set up an update Msg in your update function.

        AnimateMsg animMsg ->
            let
                (newState, cmds) = update model.animState
            in
            ({ model | animState = newState }, Cmd.map AnimateHeight cmds)

Render your view in our container.

someCoolView : Html Msg
someCoolView : 
    -- cool view stuff --
    
view : Model -> Msg
view model =
  container 
    (default 
      |> content someCoolView
      |> state model.animHeightState
     )

Trigger an Animation in your update statement.

    case msg of
        ShowContainerStuff ->
            (toHigh animHeightState, Cmd.none)
            
        HideContainerStuff ->
            (toLow animHeightState, Cmd.none)

Focus on performance

Animating the height of a container does mean paying a performance cost. The browser needs to perform layout and paint operations and these can be expensive.

elm-animate-height gives you two strategies in which to perform the animation, Transition and AnimationFrame.

Transition leverages css transitions to perform the animation which means no view updates are triggered on the container.

AnimationFrame will trigger view updates but manually calculates the height of the container to the browsers refresh cadence.

Which one performs the best in your situation is just a matter of experimenting.

Setting the strategy can be done on the initial state

init : Model
init = 
    initialState (uniqueContainerId "123")
        |> animationFrame

Adjusts to dynamic content

Sometimes the content you give elm-animate-height can change. For example you might have a list of old wooden ship names that you can add and remove, making the list longer or shorter. To animate the container height to the changing content you can ask elm-animate-height to perform a recalculation.

    case msg of
        ContentChanged ->
            let
                newstate =
                    recalculation model.animHeightState
            in    
            ({ model | animHeightState = newState }, Cmd.none)

Modules

AnimateHeight