How to add Grid Layout in React Native

It is easy to create a grid layout css as it supports display: grid and with this, we can create a grid layout. We can even set an even spacing between items. Also, we can arrange a specific number of items in a column. But all of this is unsupported in React Native styles. So it is hard to create a layout like this in React Native. In this article, we are going to make a Grid Layout in React Native, which will be the same visually as the CSS grid.

Initialize Grid Layout

For this, we are not going to install any package. We are going to create it from scratch with React Native Stylesheet. So let’s create this step by step. The full code will be at the end of the article.

• First, we need to analyze the width of the user screen. For this, we are going to import the Dimensions from react native package.

import { Dimensions } from 'react-native';

• Then we will get the width of the screen

// Get the width of screen
const { width } = Dimensions.get('window');
const windowWidth = width;

• For this article, we will take 3 items per row and the gap will be 12 units. We will save these two values in two variables so that we can use it later as well

const gap = 12;
const itemPerRow = 3;

• The total gap will be 2 for 3 items. so for our example, the total gap is 12*2 = 24 units.

const totalGapSize = (itemPerRow - 1) * gap;

• So each child will get a space of total available width after removing the total gap width / 3

const childWidth = (windowWidth - totalGapSize) / itemPerRow;

Grid Layout in React Native Component

For the component, we are going to add some dummy data in a react-native scroll view. So that this layout can update dynamically with as many items as we can provide. Let’s create the map with dummy data.

import React from 'react';
import { StyleSheet, Text, SafeAreaView, ScrollView } from 'react-native';

const GridView = () => {
  const items = [
    {
      id: 1,
      title: 'Item 1',
      backgroundColor: 'red',
    },
    {
      id: 2,
      title: 'Item 2',
      backgroundColor: 'green',
    },
    {
      id: 3,
      title: 'Item 3',
      backgroundColor: 'blue',
    },
    {
      id: 4,
      title: 'Item 4',
      backgroundColor: 'yellow',
    },
    {
      id: 5,
      title: 'Item 5',
      backgroundColor: 'orange',
    },
  ];

  return (
    <SafeAreaView>
      <ScrollView>
        {items.map((item) => (
          <Text
            key={item.id}
            style={{
              backgroundColor: item.backgroundColor,
            }}
          >
            {item.title}
          </Text>
        ))}
      </ScrollView>
    </SafeAreaView>
  );
};

export default GridView;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({});

Now we are going to add some styles to the Scrollview and to the items. First, add the styles for the container. The styles will be the following

  itemsWrap: {
    display: 'flex',
    flexDirection: 'row',
    flexWrap: 'wrap',
    marginVertical: -(gap / 2),
    marginHorizontal: -(gap / 2),
  },

Look how we are subtracting half of the gap size from the margin. This is the important part. For the child items styles, these will be styles

  singleItem: {
    marginHorizontal: gap / 2,
    minWidth: childWidth,
    maxWidth: childWidth,
  },

For a single item, we are adding the half of gap marginHorizontal to normalize the spacing between items. And here is the full code –

import React from 'react';
import { StyleSheet, Text, SafeAreaView, ScrollView } from 'react-native';

// Gap stuff
const { width } = Dimensions.get('window');
const gap = 12;
const itemPerRow = 3;
const totalGapSize = (itemPerRow - 1) * gap;
const windowWidth = width;
const childWidth = (windowWidth - totalGapSize) / itemPerRow;

const GridView = () => {
  const items = [
    {
      id: 1,
      title: 'Item 1',
      backgroundColor: 'red',
    },
    {
      id: 2,
      title: 'Item 2',
      backgroundColor: 'green',
    },
    {
      id: 3,
      title: 'Item 3',
      backgroundColor: 'blue',
    },
    {
      id: 4,
      title: 'Item 4',
      backgroundColor: 'yellow',
    },
    {
      id: 5,
      title: 'Item 5',
      backgroundColor: 'orange',
    },
  ];

  return (
    <SafeAreaView>
      <ScrollView style={styles.itemsWrap}>
        {items.map((item) => (
          <Text
            key={item.id}
            style={{
              backgroundColor: item.backgroundColor,
              ...styles.singleItem,
            }}
          >
            {item.title}
          </Text>
        ))}
      </ScrollView>
    </SafeAreaView>
  );
};

export default GridView;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  itemsWrap: {
    display: 'flex',
    flexDirection: 'row',
    flexWrap: 'wrap',
    marginVertical: -(gap / 2),
    marginHorizontal: -(gap / 2),
  },
  singleItem: {
    marginHorizontal: gap / 2,
    minWidth: childWidth,
    maxWidth: childWidth,
  },
});