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Creating a Responsive Menu in Open Event Frontend

Open Event Frontend uses semantic ui for creating responsive HTML components, however there are some components that are not responsive in nature like buttons & menus. Therefore we need to convert tabbed menus to a one column dropdown menu in mobile views. In this post I describe how we make menus responsive. We are creating a semantic UI custom styling component in Ember to achieve this.

In Open Event we are using the tabbed menus for navigation to a particular route as shown below.

Menu (Desktop)

As you can see there is an issue when viewing the menu on mobile screens.

Menu (Mobile)

Creating custom component for menu

To make the menu responsive we created a custom component called tabbed-navigation which converts the horizontal menu into a vertical dropdown menu for smaller screens. We are using semantic ui styling components for the component to implement the vertical dropdown for mobile view.

tabbed-navigation.js

currentRoute: computed('session.currentRouteName', 'item', function() {
  var path = this.get('session.currentRouteName');
  var item = this.get('item');
  if (path && item) {
    this.set('item', this.$('a.active'));
    this.$('a').addClass('vertical-item');
    return this.$('a.active').text().trim();
  }
}),
didInsertElement() {
  var isMobile = this.get('device.isMobile');
  if (isMobile) {
    this.$('a').addClass('vertical-item');
  }
  this.set('item', this.$('a.active'));
},
actions: {
  toggleMenu() {
    var menu = this.$('div.menu');
    menu.toggleClass('hidden');
  }
}

In the component we check if the device is mobile & change the classes accordingly. For mobile devices we add the vertical-item class to all the items in the menu. We set a property called item in the component which stores the selected item of the menu.

We add a computed property called currentRoute which observes the current route and the selected item, and sets the item to currently active route, and returns the name of the current route.

We add an action toggleMenu which is used to toggle the display of the vertical menu for mobile devices.

tabbed-navigation.hbs

We add a vertical menu dynamically for mobile devices with a button and the name of the current selected item which is stored in currentRoute variable, we also toggle between horizontal & vertical menu based on the screen size.

{{#if device.isMobile}}
  <div role="button" class="ui segment center aligned" {{action 'toggleMenu'}}>
    {{currentRoute}}
  </div>
{{/if}}
<div role="button" class="mobile hidden ui fluid stackable {{unless isNonPointing (unless device.isMobile 'pointing')}} {{unless device.isMobile (if isTabbed 'tabular' (if isVertical 'vertical' 'secondary'))}} menu" {{action 'toggleMenu'}}>
  {{yield}}
</div>

tabbed-navigation.scss

.tabbed-navigation {
  .vertical-item {
    display: block !important;
    text-align: center;
  }
}

Our custom component must look like an item of the menu, to ensure this we use display block property which will allow us to place the menu appear below the toggle button. We also center the menu items so that it looks more like a vertical dropdown.

{{#tabbed-navigation}}
  {{#link-to 'events.view.index' class='item'}}
    {{t 'Overview'}}
  {{/link-to}}
  {{#link-to 'events.view.tickets' class='item'}}
    {{t 'Tickets'}}
  {{/link-to}}
  <a href="#" class='item'>{{t 'Scheduler'}}</a>
  {{#link-to 'events.view.sessions' class='item'}}
    {{t 'Sessions'}}
  {{/link-to}}
  {{#link-to 'events.view.speakers' class='item'}}
    {{t 'Speakers'}}
  {{/link-to}}
  {{#link-to 'events.view.export' class='item'}}
    {{t 'Export'}}
  {{/link-to}}
{{/tabbed-navigation}}

To use this component all we need to do is wrap our menu inside the tabbed-navigation component and it will convert the horizontal menu to the vertical menu for mobile devices.

The outcome of this change on the Open Event Front-end now looks like this:

Thank you for reading the blog, you can check the source code for the example here.

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